Question

In the debug properties of my c# project I have selected Start External Program and selected the .exe of the program I wish to attach the debugger to. However, now I need to launch the program from a .bat file not the .exe but VS2005 does not seem to allow this. Is this possible?

EDIT: To clarify, I need to debug the .exe that gets spawned from the .bat. Not debug the .exe launched from “start external program” and also have the .bat execute as well.

Cheers!

Answer 1

Assuming there is no other simple answer, you could use a macro to start and attach to the process. There is a sample macro in the Samples macro project that gets installed with Visual Studio but I’ve pasted a relevant snippet below. Once have a macro to execute the batch file, pause for a bit, then attach to the process – you can add the macro to the Visual Studio toolbar so you can run it with a click.

' Lifted from Samples.vsmacros '
' VSDebugger.AttachToCalc '
Sub AttachToCalc()
    Dim attached As Boolean = False
    Dim proc As EnvDTE.Process

    For Each proc In DTE.Debugger.LocalProcesses
        If (Right(proc.Name, 8) = "calc.exe") Then
            proc.Attach()
            attached = True
            Exit For
        End If
    Next

    If attached = False Then
        MsgBox("calc.exe is not running")
    End If

End Sub