Remote debugging on x64 Windows Server 2003

Question

I had a web service installed on an 32-bit Windows Server 2003 machine. I was able to remotely debug it from my Windows 7 64-bit machine with VS 2010, by making the x86 debugger exe available from a share on my machine. Everything was working fine until over the weekend they decided to upgrade the server machine to 64-bit.

Now when I try to remotely debug with the x86 debugger it gives me the error:

When I use the x64 debugger, it doesn't throw an error but it doesn't load the symbols for the project so I can't debug it anyway.

Any ideas as to why this is? What should I be doing differently?

Answer 1

Not sure if this is an option for you but you can either

• set VS to produce an x86 executable (build options, platform target x86)
• or if your web service is running in IIS, create an app pool that runs as a x86 process

Go to Application Pools in the IIS Management Console, right click your application pool and select "Set Application Pool Defaults...". In the properties dialog, set "Enable 32 Bit Applications" to "True."

That way your should be able to use the x86 debugger (since that worked before).

---

apparently you can set IIS 6 to run in x86 mode with:

%SystemDrive%\inetpub\AdminScripts\adsutil.vbs set w3svc/AppPools/Enable32bitAppOnWin64 1

afterwards also run

%windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_regiis -i