Visual Studio Remote Debugging a service

8
votes

I'm trying to remote debug a service using visual studio 2005.

When I run msvsmon.exe as an application, I get the UI and I can change it to noauth and anyuser, then when i try to attach to the process from visual studio remotely, i get an erro saying that it can't attach to a process being run in a session that msvsmon.exe isn't running in. The session of the service is 0.

So I can successfully run msvsmon.exe as a service, but I can't set it up to be in /noauth and /anyuser mode.

The binPath for the service is: "c:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\Remote Debugger\x86\msvsmon.exe" /service msvsmon90

both /noauth and /anyuser are the commandline switches for msvsmon.

Filling out the 'start parameters' in the service properties window doesn't affect anything.

changing the binPath of the service to:

"c:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\Remote Debugger\x86\msvsmon.exe" /service msvsmon90 /noauth /anyuser

also does not work (as the service fails to start properly).

How do i get the remote debugging monitor to run as a service in noauth and anyuser mode?

3
debuggingservicevisual-studio-2005

3 Answers

3
votes

Not sure if this would work for you, but have you tried using psexec (from sysinternals) to run msvsmon interactively on session 0?

The command-line would be something like this (from an elevated command-prompt):

psexec –sd –i 0 "c:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\Remote Debugger\x86\msvsmon.exe" /noauth /anyuser

I'm doing something similar to debug some code when logging off of Windows.

3
votes

You will need an additional switch that supresses the warning since the program will actually not start but stuck in a warning message this case (you can check btw when add a /port:xxx argument and see that without the supressing there are no listener at the specified port).

So the working example:

    psexec –sd –i 0 "c:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\Remote Debugger\x86\msvsmon.exe" /noauth /anyuser /port:4000 /nosecuritywarn
0
votes

Another useful switch is /nowowwarn suppressing warnings for Win32 monitor on 64-bit machine. For the comprehensive list of all available switches run \msvsmon /?