Visual Studio 2010 Debugger

Question

I'm having some problems (as some of you will see from another question I asked) with getting a program I made in Visual Studio 2010 to run on another computer. My computer is Windows 7 x64 The destination computer is Windows XP x86 (SP2)

I've already checked to see that I'm compiling for x86.

Anyway, my question is: Is there a debugger I can install that will tell me what errors the program is having? Like a .NET Debugger that does not involve me installing Visual Studio 2010 on the destination computer?

Answer 1

Another option is to use a program like ProcDump to take several snapshot dumps of your program on the remote computer and USB copy them to debug back at your workstation.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/dd996900.aspx

You can save a dump at various triggers like an Unhandled exception. Visual Studio can open the dump back at your workstation and 2010 supports mixed mode debugging.

Answer 2

One option is to use WinDbg + the SOS extension. This is a much lighter weight debugger that is easily installable but has a steeper learning curve than Visual Studio. I often use it though when I need a light weight debugging experience

• WinDbg http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/debugging/installx86.Mspx
• SOS: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb190764.aspx

Answer 3

If you have access to the client computer when it is running the program, the easiest thing would probably be to deploy the remote debugger, and debug the program on your own machine, while it is running on the client PC.

Otherwise, you can use DbgClr, which is distrubted with the .NET framework SDK.