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What’s “Enable RPC Debugging” option in VS.NET?

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The “Enable RPC Debugging” option is a somewhat well hidden option in Visual Studio .NET. It is available in VS.NET 2002, 2003 & 2005. You can set/clear this option by navigating to the Tools menu and selecting Options. On the options dialog select the Debugging->Native property page.

Unfortunately this setting only applies to C/C++ projects but it does allow you to step into both inproc and out of proc COM servers. The only thing you need to do is ensure that your solution settings point to the correct source code and symbol location for the COM server. This might not be news for you for inproc servers (dlls) but may be news for out of proc. Instead of having to set your project to launch a separate program, launch a second debugger, or manually attach vs.net to your out of proc exe, this option will have VS.NET do all of this for you automatically! There are no timing issues with attaching the debugger or anything, you’d step into the method calls of the out of proc server just as if it were in proc.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    May 09, 2005
    With VS 2005, there is some support for managed projects. You just need to make sure that you are interop (managed + unmanaged) debugging.