Debug XP application on Vista computer

Question

I am building an MFC application for both XP and Vista. I have Visual Studio 2008 installed on the XP machine but I need to debug the application on Vista. How can I do that? Do I really have to install Visual Studio on a Vista machine?

When using remote debugging I assume that all executable and library files must be in my Vista virtual machine. But I can seem to copy the MFC debug DLLs to the Vista VM, and as a result I keep getting side-by-side configuration errors.

I would prefer to remote debug the application without having to copy any files, how can I do that? And if I can't, how can I install the MFC DLLs without having to install Visual Studio on the Vista machine?

Note: I have Vista installed on a virtual machine using Virtual PC. I just don't know how to run the debug version of my application there.

Answer 1

You can install VirtualPC (or other virtualization software) and install Vista as virtual system, so you don't need two computers. For this part of the debugging, it probably better that you explicitly do not install visual studio to make sure there's not some hidden dependency in your program that visual studio provides. At this point you want to be testing the fully-deployed version of the app.

The biggest rule I've found so far for developing for vista is making sure that you never write anything to the same folder where the program is installed. Write to the Application Data folder instead. This was a rule for XP, too, but it's much more strictly enforced in vista.

Answer 2

If you have Visual Studio Pro or Team, you can give remote debugging a shot. There's just a tiny stub that gets installed on the remote computer.

If you want to run a debug build of your application, you will need to install the debug runtime files on the virtual PC as well.