Why are no Symbols loaded when remote debugging

remote-debuggingvisual-studio-2008

I want to use remote debugging.
The program that I want to debug runs on machine b.
Visual Studio runs on machine a.

On machine b I have a folder with the following files:

msvcr72.dll
msvsmon.exe
NatDbgDE.dll
NatDbgDEUI.dll
NatDbgEE.dll
NatDbgEEUI.dll

If you think some files are missing, could you also describe where they are usually located?

In the next step I started the msvsmon.exe and my program on machine b. On machine a, I started Visual Studio 2008 and my solution in which the program was written. Then I choose "Debug – Attach to Process". I chose "Remote Transport (Native Only with no authentication)". I used the correct IP as a qualifier and took the right process (program.exe). After a while the following message occurred in a popup-window:

Unhandled exception at 0x7c812a7b in program.exe: 0xE0434F4D: 0xe0434f4d

I can continue or break; When continuing, the exception occurs again and again and again. So I pressed break and the following message occurred:

No symbols are loaded for any call stack frame. The source code cannot be displayed.

Best Answer

Make sure you copy the .PDB file that is generated with your assembly into the same folder on the remote machine. This will allow the debugger to pickup the debug symbols.

Related Solutions

VS2008: Unable to start debugging, Remote Debugging Monitor has been closed

If you are on a 64bit OS then you are 'silently' remote debugging. Devenv runs in WoW64 (meaning it's a 32bit process) ... when you hit F5 is launchs msvsmon.exe as a 64 bit process and sets up a communication channel between devenv and msvsmon "silent remote debugging" to allow debugging your 64 bit process.

Check task manager when you are successfully debugging and you should see msvsmon.exe running.

If the above assumption (64bit OS) is correct, the error you are seeing is based on Visual studio getting into a bad state. If it gives this error while an msvsmon.exe instance is running ... kill that instance. If there is no msvsmon.exe running, then restarting devenv is probably your only option.

Another possible workaround is to set your project to 'platform x86' so that you are directly debugging. The x86 compiled managed assemblies or native binaries will run in Wow64, and prevent any need for the silent remote debugging. (Obviously this doesn't help if it is a 64-bit only problem ... but in practice that is rare.)

I hope this helped or can assist you in searching out a better answer.

Remote debugging in visual studio: remote debugger does not support this edition of windows

The error message "The visual studio remote debugger does not support this edition of windows" appears because the remote debugger tries to use Windows Authentication by default, and this is only supported in the "Pro" versions of Windows, and up.

However, the remote debugger does work with the "Home" versions of Windows, you just have to tell it not to use authentication via the command line.

(Why it doesn't let you do this after launching it without any arguments, why the error message is so misleading (and contradicts the official list of supported OS), and why there is so little info about this on the web, I don't know. :))

To launch it, run this:

msvsmon.exe /noauth /nosecuritywarn

Of course, this launches it in the lowest security mode, so you'd only want to do this on a secure network. (But that's usually the mode one ends up using msvcmon in anyway, as the other mode is an even bigger PITA to set up than it is normally. Very useful tool, but really could use some streamlining.)

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