Why are no Symbols loaded when remote debugging?

Question

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

Answer 1

I was able to get this working by going to Project Properties, Compile tab and setting the Build output path to my remote machine eg \myserver\myshare\myappdir

In the debug tab I have Use remote machine checked and set to myserver

Answer 2

1800 INFORMATION is right, you have to do remote debugging with Windows authentication in order to debug managed code, otherwise you won't be able to load the symbols for managed assemblies. Getting this to work with authentication is pretty tricky, as it requires local accounts on both machines with identical passwords, among other things. This question and everyone's answers are quite useful for getting that working.

Remote Debugging in Visual Studio (VS2008), Windows Forms Application

Answer 3

I had the same issues. Found the answer on the msdn forums I'll just copy/paste the correct answer here:

Make sure that you're using the correct version of msvsmon.exe!!! That's all it was! i had the same problem while remote debugging a C# application. I was using x64 msvsmon.exe because the server runs Windows Server 2008 64-bit, but the application was written for x86, so I had to run the x86 version of msvsmon.exe in order to get rid of this annoying error. Nothing else was needed. Just run the version of msvsmon.exe that corresponds to the target architecture of your application ^_^

Answer 4

0xE0434F4D is an exception from the CLR (i.e., managed code). You need to do remote debugging with authentication and choose to debug managed code. Alternatively, it is possible to extract out the managed exception info using some debugger extensions but it is a bit more hard work.

References:

If broken it is...

Answer 5

Go to Tools->Options->Debugging->Symbols and add the path to the .pdb files for the executable. The path on my local machine worked fine.

Answer 6

I also ran into this when using a custom build configuration. (DEV instead of Debug)

To correct this, I modified the Project Properties-->Build-->Output-->Advanced setting and ensured the Output-->Debug Info setting was full or pdb-only. The default Release configuration is typically set to none.