CODEWITHSUNDEEP
windows-8visual-studio-2012remote-debugging
Danny Johnson
Danny Johnson

Reputation: 495

Can't remote debug onto Surface (Win RT) Tablet from VS2012-Express - "Unable to resolve the specified computer name"

I am developing windows store apps for the surface tablet.

I am remote debugging onto a surface tablet via the local network. At first I had no issues with this, and then occasionally about one out of every four times it would fail to deploy, and I would get the message:

Error: Unable to connect to the Microsoft Visual Studio Remote Debugging Monitor named 'my_debugging_tablet'. The debugger cannot connect to the remote computer. The debugger was unable to resolve the specified computer name.

Initially when this happened, I would simply deploy the project again and the error would not occur again, or, occasionally, I would close and then re-open the Remote Debugging Monitor on the tablet, but generally this would happen seemingly randomly and not re-occur.

However, lately, it has been happening more and more often (with no changes to my code) and now I have been unable to deploy at all, ever, for a couple of days now (and thus I cannot debug on my tablet.)

The same error message listed above is what displays every time I try to deploy or debug.

I verified in project properties that the target device and remote machine name were set correctly, and each time verified that the connection on both the surface tablet and my host computer were fine (my host machine is Windows 8 on Oracle Virtualbox.)

From project properties, if I attempt to manually "Find" the target device (as it does when you deploy back when this used to work) it is unable to locate my tablet (or anything) on my local network. ("Found 0 connections on my subnet")

My MS developer license registration is up to date as well. Additionally, there doesn't seem to be an issue the local network, as both my host machine and the tablet can "see" other things on the network (printers, etc.)

I can't for the life of me figure this out, because, as I mentioned, there have not been any changes to anything such as developer license registration, network status, code, or anything else that should have affected this.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 1737

Answers (1)

Matt Harrington
Matt Harrington

Reputation: 638

I originally read your question and thought you were saying the two devices could see each other, except through Visual Studio. I was scratching my head at that.

Visual Studio just uses the OS to resolve names and addresses. I recommend troubleshooting the connectivity problems outside of VS, as the problem is larger than just trouble with remote debugging.

Try nbtstat -n to verify you can see what you expect on your network.

Upvotes: 2

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