I frequently need to debug .NET binaries on test machines (by test-machine, I mean that the machine doesn’t have Visual Studio installed on it, it’s frequently re-imaged, It’s not the same machine that I do my development on, etc).
I love the Visual Studio debugger, but it’s not practical for me to install visual studios on a freshly imaged test-machine just to debug an assertion or crash (the install takes way too long, the footprint is too large, etc).
I’d really like a quickly installed program that could break into a running process, let me specify the location of symbols/source code, and let me jump right into debugging. For native binaries, windbg works great, but I haven’t found anything similiar for managed binaries. Any recommendations?
(as a side note, I am aware of visual studios remote debugging capabilities, but for some reason it never seems to work consistently for me… I often have connection issues)
I’ve finally found extensions for Windbg that do just what I wanted: Sosex.dll, lets me use windbg to debug managed applications with very minimal installation required. I’ve used it for more than a year now, and It’s worked, without fault, for every debugging scenario I’ve encountered.