Why does DebugView not show debugging messages when Visual Studio does

Question

I am developing a Browser Helper Object running inside Internet Explorer. I am writing debugging messages with ATLTRACE("..."); These appear fine when Visual Studio is attached to the iexplore.exe process, but this is slow for a quick test. DebugView captures nothing from my BHO.

Why does DebugView not show BHO debug messages? Is it something to do with Internet Explorer running at low integrity level?

Answer 1

Assuming that you're running IE on Vista or later (which it sounds like since you're talking about integrity levels), you can set the integrity level of DebugView to a lower integrity so any application can send messages to it:

icacls dbgview.exe /setintegritylevel low

And if you don't like the idea of permanently setting dbgview to low integrity (it might make saving logs and whatnot a bit of a pain, as they will only go into the low-integrity store) you can run a particular instance of dbgview at low integrity using Sysinternals' psexec tool:

psexec -l dbgview

Finally, if all you're worried about is the amount of time that it takes to load up the VS debugger to attach to the process, you can use a command line debugger (like ntsd.exe or cdb.exe). Ntsd.exe comes with Windows, but a newer version comes with the "Debugging Tools for Windows" package, which also includes the very similar cdb.exe.

Answer 2

For your quick tests, is Visual Studio still running? If so, that might cause this problem.