Using remote debugging on Virtual PC

Question

At the moment I'm looking into upgrading my development machine to Vista. But because we are still creating and supporting software for XP I do need some possibility for debugging on an XP platform.

Therefore I was thinking to use Virtual PC to run an instance of XP and then use the remote debugging feature from VS2005 to debug on this vpc image.

 

My question is, is this possible? And if so, are people here using this approach already and could they name any pros and cons about it?

Answer 1

Absolutely... in fact it’s not uncommon for a developer to have a collection of Virtual PC images so they can quickly test their app in any one of a number of Windows versions as it means they can go back and forth between versions in seconds as well as be able to easily restore a VM to a previous state with just the click of a button.

Answer 2

Brilliant, that was what I was hoping to hear!

 

Are there any MSDN articles/blogs posts/guides that you know of which could provide me some more tips for setting this up?

Answer 3

Specific to remote debugging under VPC? I haven’t found any.

 

In general though remote debugging under VPC is pretty much the same as doing it to another physical PC. Once you get the Remote Debugging Monitor setup on the target machine it’s just a matter of copying over the proper binaries and you are pretty much there.

Answer 4

I actually did find a whitepaper about debugging with VPC: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/virtualpc/debug.mspx

 

It is written for VS2005 + VPC2004, but I'm sure most of it is still relevant.

 

Answer 5

That whitepaper is pretty thorough, but I did have one other question.  Is it possible to remote debug a virtual machine on a different domain/workgroup?  The reason I ask is that my host system is a member of a domain, but my VM is set up as a workgroup.  Is it possible to remote debug in this case?  When I try to attach to a process from the host, I can't see machines on a workgroup.