Check if application was started from within Visual Studio

Question

I am working on an application that installs a system wide keyboard hook. I do not want to install this hook when I am running a debug build from inside the visual studio (or else it would hang the studio and eventually the system), and I can avoid this by checking if the DEBUG symbol is defined.

However, when I debug the release version of the application, is there a way to detect that it has been started from inside visual studio to avoid the same problem? It is very annoying to have to restart the studio/the computer, just because I had been working on the release build, and want to fix some bugs using the debugger having forgotten to switch back to the debug build.

Currently I use something like this to check for this scenario:

System.Diagnostics.Process currentProcess = System.Diagnostics.Process.GetCurrentProcess();
string moduleName = currentProcess.MainModule.ModuleName;
bool launchedFromStudio = moduleName.Contains(".vshost");

I would call this the "brute force way", which works in my setting, but I would like to know whether there's another (better) way of detecting this scenario.

Answer 1

Try:

System.Diagnostics.Debugger.IsAttached.

Answer 2

I would strongly discourage the use of code that only gets run at debug time. Why? You'd like to make sure that what goes into production is what you're testing / seeing locally. This is especially true the lower level language you use as often times differences in code causes the compiler to produce your machine / IL differently.

Perhaps for the purposes of discovering an issue, but that's about it.

Answer 3

@Russell Myers

I disagree. When you know you're in debug time, you can do far more checks without worrying about performance, do asserts, and all sorts of magical things.

Answer 4

For those working with Windows API, there's a function which allows you to see if any debugger is present using:

if( IsDebuggerPresent() )
{
    ...
}

Reference: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms680345.aspx

Answer 5

Checking if you're under debugger, allow you to do some special things, like logs etc...