Visual Studio 2012 Remote Debugging: Invalid access to memory location

Question

I followed the instructions in this link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bt727f1t.aspx to install the remote debugger (2012) on my server where the application is running in hope to debug it remotely from my dev machine running visual studio 2012.

I cannot even get as far as viewing the list of processes to attach to on the remote machine. I keep getting "Unable to connect to the Microsoft Visual Studio Remote Debugging Monitor named [name]. Invalid access to memory location".

I have managed to successfully connect a few times but then the attach fails immediately then I cannot connect again.

This is causing huge issues for me as I cannot remote debug anything. I must be missing something glaring. Please someone give me a solution.

Answer 1

I've found the only way to correct this is by restarting Visual Studio.

Worked for me. I found it at this blog post about invalid access and remote debugging.

Answer 2

It turns out the one thing I missed was to tell Visual Studio where to find the .pdb symbols relating to the remote process. To do this go to Tools -> Options -> Debugging then in the Symbol (.pdb) locations add the remote location to the pdb files.

To clarify, I was attaching fine but could not break into code. Now I can. Be aware though that there are other hurdles before you get to my stage where I was attaching to the process successfully but could not catch a breakpoint.