Monday, December 01, 2014

Visual Studio 2013.2+ and 2015 Child Process Debugging Power Tool

Microsoft Application Lifecycle Management - Introducing the Child Process Debugging Power Tool

We’ve heard your feedback that you want the Visual Studio debugger to support child process debugging. Child process debugging means that when the application you are debugging creates another process, Visual Studio will detect this and automatically attach a debugger to the newly created process as well. To address this we’re releasing a power tool for Visual Studio that will enable you to do just this. Some important things to note:

  • Download the tool from the Visual Studio Gallery
  • The power tool requires at least Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 (will work with any higher update version and Visual Studio 2015)
  • The tool works for both launching projects (F5), and for attaching to processes
  • It requires a native debugger. This means if you are debugging .NET code, you must choose to enable mixed mode debugging (so managed and native)—this is done from the “Debug” tab on the project properties page (for most managed project types this is done by checking the “Enable native code debugging” checkbox under the “Enable debuggers” section of the page)

Once you install the power tool from the Visual Studio Gallery, a new menu item will appear on the “Debug” menu under the “Other Debug Targets” sub-menu.

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This is one of those tools where if you've wanted it you have REALLY want it, and if not, you could care less. If you are one of the "Care Less'ers," just favorite this for now, you might very well need this one day (I don't need to tell the Care'ers because they left this page at first read to go download it... :)

1 comment:

Marc Sherman said...

Debugging child processes with WinDbg since forever ;)