How to get DirectX debug messages under remote debugging with VS2008 without installing the DXSDK on the remote machine?

Question

I'm trying to debug some problems that only happen on some Windows XP machines. My development system uses Vista, and I'd like to avoid having to setup a complete development environment in XP to debug this problem. I've successfully setup remote debugging to the XP systems using VS2008, but have not been able to get DirectX to output any debug statements. Searching MSDN didn't turn up anything that solved the problem. I tried copying all of the Debug DLLs from my development PC's %DXSDK_DIR%\Developer Runtime\x86 to the program's working directory and then to the Windows\System32 directory as described here. I then copied over the %DXSDK_DIR%\Utilities\Bin directory and used the DirectX Control Panel to set DirectX to debug on the remote PC to no avail. Switching my dev PC to use Debug DirectX didn't help either.

All that being said, does anyone know how to get DirectX to output debug messages in VS2008 over a remote debugging session other than installing the DirectX SDK on the remote machine (which did actually work, but isn't always practical)?

Answer 1

You could try Debug View? Its a small Microsoft sysinternals tool that captures all trace / debug statements written on the machine its running on (without having to attach a debugger)

Answer 2

I doubt it's possible. The messages are only output by the debug runtime and the only official way to install that is to install the SDK. You might be able to figure out a way to get the debug runtimes working by copying certain files over and changing a few registry settings without doing a complete install but it's almost certainly easier to just install the SDK.