Visual Studio 2005 - Remote Debugging Connection Issue?

Question

I’m trying to get remote debugging working again on a Windows 2003 server that I use for ASP.Net 2.0 development. I had everything up and running for months then one day, I was forced by our AD policy to change my password and the remote debugging has not worked since.

I have a Windows 2003 server running virtually (MS Virtual PC 2007) on the same system that I run my Visual Studio 2005 IDE from (Windows XP Pro). Both systems are members of the same domain and my domain account is in the admin group of both systems. I’m logged into the XP machine running Visual Studio and the Windows server running the Debug Console using this domain account.

When I try to attach to the remote debugger from within VS I get an error after about 1 minute… “Unable to connect to the Microsoft Visual Studio Remote Debugging Monitor and ‘myServer’. This operation returned because the timeout period expired.”

When attaching from VS, I have used just the server name as well as the full debug server instance name (Domain\user@myServer) that is listed in the console but I get the same results. I have also tried running the console as a service using my domain account (this is the original way I had it setup) and from a share on the XP PC running VS….again same results. I also checked the permissions on the Debug Console and both the admin group as well as my domain account are listed and Debug is set to “Allow” for both.

When I try to attach to the debugger from within VS I can see the connection popup on the Remote Debug Console of the server and it says it’s connected but I noticed that it’s trying to connect as a different user than what I’m logged into either machine as. The debug console shows the connection belongs to a local account (myServer\user1)… I would expect to see Domain\User. The local account that shows in the debug console does exist locally on both systems and is in the local admin group on each system but I have no idea why it would all of a sudden try to use that account rather than the domain account I’m logged in as on both systems.

As I mentioned, everything was working for months and only seem to stop functioning after the AD account password was changed.

Does anyone have any ideas on what could be causing this issue?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Answer 1

I thought I would put an update to this question in case someone else runs into a similar issue.

Well after pulling my hair out on this issue for a couple days now, I decided to try installing VS 2005 on a new workstation. I was able to connect to the remote debug process of my dev server without any problems.

I’m still not 100% sure what the actually cause of the problem was but I thnk it was related to 2 different issues. Once I was able to get the remote debugging working from the new workstation I decided to reset the VS Environmental settings on the one I was having issue with. I’m not sure why I did not try this sooner …but this seems to have taken care of the problem and remote debugging now works from the system I was having problems with.

The issue of the wrong user was due to a cached login account being used over that of the currently logged in domain user. I ran "%windir%\system32\rundll32.exe keymgr.dll, KRShowKeyMgr" on the workstation running VS, found the local account in question, deleted it from the Stored User Names and Passwords box and from that point on the remote debugger used my domain account as it should.