Question

Does anyone know how you set the remote debug monitor qualifier used by Visual Studio when attempting to connect to MSVSMON automatically?

To give the context of this question:

On our development web server, we have IIS running and an MSVSMON session as ‘Stephen.Edmonds@UK06695’.

On my development machine, I have Visual Studio 2008 setup with “Use Custom Web Server” pointed at the development web server. When I “start debugging” in Visual Studio, it connects correctly to the development web server as you would expect.

On a colleagues machine, we have the same setup (although for obvious reasons he is logged in as a different user). When he tries “start debugging” in Visual Studio on the same project, it fails to connect to the web server because it’s looking for an MSVSMON session called His.Name@UK06695.

Attempts to manually attach work from both machines provided that the qualifier is set to ‘stephen.edmonds@UK06695’, so I can be reasonably sure that it is not a problem with either firewalls or permissions.

So, does anyone know how to specify the qualifier to be used when automatically connecting via “start debug session”?

Answer 1

I believe that Remote Debugging works in one of two ways:

1. In the context of the user who started the session. Which is what I think you have at the moment and is the reason only you can automatically attach to the process.
2. As a service, running as a user whose account must have the privilege to ‘Log on as a service’ and have network access rights.

Since you want to remotely debug using multiple accounts I would suggest using the Remote Debugger Configuration Wizard to change it to run as a service. I will also check your permissions for Remote Debugging to ensure that your colleagues account is set to Allow debugging.