How might I debug a program on a remote machine?

Question

I'm sure this has been asked and answered, and I apologize for that, but I'm not really even sure what I'm looking for or need to do. I'm an electrical engineer that can play with programming, but when it comes to servers and remote stuff, I get really lost.

Anyway, here's the stick. I'll try to be specific.

I'm not sure this part matters, but I'll try to explain for clarity's sake. We are developing a machine. This machine is run by an IPC. The IPC is basically a PLC that has embedded Windows 7, and the IPC itself is programmed with Structured Text which is written in VS2013 (doesn't work on newer versions). In order to 'activate' the programming and parameters that we set in VS2013, this computer must be connected to the machine with an ethernet cable. I can also remote in to manually control the machine from this computer.

For an operator to control the machine in general, a CS major wrote a program that we call the HMI, or Human Machine Interface. I access and update the code for this, which is written in C#, through VS2017. The project is set up as a solution, and in order to 'activate' this programming after making changes, I just build the solution and copy the dll file over to the machine, through the remote interface. On that machine, we just click an executable that starts the IPC and then I'm guessing the IPC has been linked to the HMI program, because that opens shortly after that.

Ok, now, I'm trying to implement a new feature into this HMI and I'm running into some unknown error. In order to correct this with any program I've written in the past, I would normally set a breakpoint and/or run the debugger and go through step by step until it breaks. However, since this program has to run in tandem with the IPC, which it passes values to and receives output from, it's more complicated than that.

The CS person I mentioned no longer works here, but his note says that the debugger can be run as long as I'm connected with the ethernet cord I mentioned. When I try, though, I get "A project with an Output type of Class Library cannot be started directly. In order to debug this project, add an executable project to this solution which references the library project. Set the executable project as the startup project."

Now, from googling, I've found and tried to set the solution as a startup project, but it didn't seem like anything happened when I selected that, and furthermore, the error persists. I'm guessing that I need to do the latter, which is to 'add an executable project to the solution and set that as the startup project'... but I really don't know what that means, at all.

Do I 'add an existing project' (under File)? If so, would that be the project/solution from VS2013?

Or do I somehow need to add the executable that we click on the machine?

I sound like an idiot, I know, and that's because I am when it comes to this stuff, haha. It may be too complex for anyone to even attempt to answer, or so simple that I'm way overthinking it. I have no idea at this point, and I'm desperate.

That said, I would really appreciate if someone had any idea. Regardless, thank you for your time.

Answer 1

You can debug an executing process by using Visual Studio's Attach to process tool which is in debug menu. This will attach your source code to an executing process as long as the code and process code match.