DebugBreak not breaking

Question

I'm writing a class in C++ that I cannot debug by using F5. The code will run from another "service" that will invoke it. In the past I've used __debugbreak() and when I got a window telling me that an exception was thrown selected to debug it.

Recently I've updated to windows 7 and it kept working for a while.

Today when I've tried to debug a piece of my code instead of shown the regular dialog that tells me that VSTestHost has stopped working and enable me to to debug the application I got a different dialog suggesting I send the data to microsoft for analysis.

Does anyone knows how can I fix this issue so I'll be able to debug my code?

Answer 1

Finally I found the cause of the issue. It's a Vista/Win7 cause:

1. Open The Action center control
2. Goto Action Center settings
3. Goto Problem Reporting Settings
4. Choose "Each time a problem occurs, ask me before checking for solution"

Although this is more of IT solution/question I've been plagued with this problem all day and wanted to share the solution with other developers who encounter this problem.

Answer 2

I finally found the solution for Windows 10 here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/debugger/enabling-postmortem-debugging

And also: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/Debug/configuring-automatic-debugging

To enable automatic debugger launch, you should add a registry value:

• key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AeDebug, value Auto = 1 (of type REG_DWORD)

The configured debugger is set the by the value Debugger (type REG_SZ); a Visual Studio installation sets this to:

"C:\WINDOWS\system32\vsjitdebugger.exe" -p %ld -e %ld

Note that on 64 bit OS this only works for 64 bit executables. To enable the same behaviour in 32 bit executables set the same values in this key:

• HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AeDebug