Jul29201329 July 201329 November 20182Commentsby Gregor Suttie

Visual Studio 2012 Remote Debugging – how to getting it working

Posted in Visual Studio

The last couple of days I’ve been trying to figure out why a console application we use at work was throwing an error whilst trying to connect to oracle, we had some issues with Devart’s DotConnect for Oracle throwing the following error – ‘Error loading db connection’

Having tried a number of options it was suggested to me that I should try remote debugging, something that I had never actually done before, odd I know but I had never set this up so below are the steps I followed to get it working:-

  • Download and install Remote Tools for Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 here – (Make sure to install the correct version x86 or x64).
  • I then started the Remote Desktop Service making sure to ‘Run As Administrator’. An entry with the date and time and a description will be shown once we connect to the remote debugging service.
  • In my case I wanted to debug a console application – so I ran the console application (on the remote server)
  • Make sure to have your VS 2012 solution open, add some breakpoints to the code you’re looking to debug on the remote server – its important that the code on the remote server is exactly the same as the code which is open in VS 2012 – if not breakpoints wont be hit.
  • Now go back to Visual Studio and from the debug menu select Attach to Process, on this screen I change the Qualifier to the name of the remote server and select the console application process from the list of running processes on the remote server.
  • If you check back on the remote server it should say that you’ve connected to the remote debugger service.
  • If all is setup correctly then your breakpoints will be hit and hopefully you can figure out why your code wasn’t working
  • Turned out the licence file we had been using was empty and by debugging I was able to see a more detailed exception stack trace and information.

This is how I got it running fairly easily – if you run into any issues :- For more info on setting up remote debugging follow this link here.

Hope this helps someone out there.