[SOLVED] Attach visual studio to a short lived process

Attach visual studio to a short lived process

I have a console application that dies very quickly, and upon inspecting the code, I can't tell exactly where it'll die (I've basically narrowed it down to a 10 line radius) so that I further debug it.

For reasons I won't go into, I can't execute the process from VS (I have the binaries, source, and pdbs though, but I can't build outside of the build server's environment), and would like to attach to the process... but when I start the process, it dies much sooner than I could ever hope to refresh the attach to process dialog.

Ideas?

Solution

One possibility for doing this is to use any existing Visual Studio project and specify the application as the application to debug. The steps (in Visual Studio 2010) are:

Go to the project properties.
Choose Debugging (under Configuration Properties)
Edit the Command and fill in the path to the binary

Then it should be possible just to start debugging (e.g., F5 or Debug\Start Debugging).

Another option that might be a bit quicker if you have the debugging tools installed would be to use WinDbg.exe. It would avoid needing to use a Visual Studio project. You can open the executable, specify command line parameters, etc. and then type g<ret> in the command line to fire it up.