Thursday 6 November 2008

DebugView and Windows Server 2008

DebugView is a great tool for development. It will provide a live feed of messages output to the Debug listener. If you make a call to System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine() then that message will appear in the DebugView console. Very useful for development, even more so when working with server products like BizTalk or SharePoint. You can insert Debug.WriteLine() statements into your code and monitor the behaviour of your application in real time.

One added bonus is that calls to System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine() are not included in the Release build of your assemblies so you're not peppering your code with statements you don't want running in production.

I've used this tool for a long time but I've discovered on Windows Server 2008 you need to run it with Elevated Privileges to be able to capture events from the Kernel and Win32. You need these enabled (under the "Capture" menu) so catch messages from applications hosted in IIS etc.

5 comments:

astellavega said...

Hey Callum,

How were you able to run debugview on Windows Server 2008? We have an installation running on a 64-bit VM that we have been trying to get DebugView running on.

It will load, but the UI is unresponsive and is unusable. Did you experience any issues like this?

Is Microsoft formally supporting DebugView on Server 2008 yet?

Thanks,
-Andrew

astellavega said...

Hey Callum,

How were you able to run debugview on Windows Server 2008? We have an installation running on a 64-bit VM that we have been trying to get DebugView running on.

It will load, but the UI is unresponsive and is unusable. Did you experience any issues like this?

Thanks,
-Andrew

Callum Hibbert said...

I have a 64 bit install of Windows Server 2008 (but it is not installed to a VM) and DebugView works flawlessly. I don't know about DebugView support but I don't think Microsoft will offer any support for virtual machines - I believe they normally request you re-create the problem on a physical machine.

George said...

I'm trying to run the latest version of Debugview on Server 2008 32 bit but it's not capturing any debug messages from my app. Is there a fix for that?

Thanks

George said...

Nevermind, I figured it out. It was a setting in debugview that just needed turned on. Capture Global Win32

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