Remote Debugging Managed Code

Last year I blogged about how to get Remote Debugging working. That article was for Visual Studio 2005, but it works fine with some minor modifications for directory and filenames for Visual Studio 2008.

Now I've had to take the next step, which is remote debugging managed code instead of native code. Turns out that debugging managed code is even more complicated than native code.

One of the key problems I originally had was that I was never able to get authenticated debugging working because one computer was on a workgroup and one was on a domain. After reading several articles, I was able to solve the problem by creating an account on the remote computer that had the same username and password as the account of the development computer. If your development system isn't on a domain, make sure that the remote account is created on the local computer and not the domain. You may need to use the "NET USER" command from the command line to create such an account.

If you are running Windows Firewall, the remote debug module msvcmon.exe will automatically unblock the right ports for you. At least that was easy.

The next trick is to convince .Net to run your application from a network drive. This technique is described in the .Net Security Blog.

By the way, the Remote Debugger Configuration Wizard was useless for me.