Martin Heller
Contributing Writer

Debugging Windows from the Web

analysis
Apr 21, 20102 mins

DebugLive allows distributed teams to collaborate remotely to debug problems, even on production servers

If you’ve ever confronted a bug in a Windows process on a production server, you know what a pain it can be to figure out what’s going on. To start with, the developer who can debug the problem is rarely onsite with the production server, so it’s either a matter of traveling to the location of the server or debugging remotely. In addition, the tester who found the issue often has difficulty giving the developer who owns the problem enough context to be able to reproduce it even if location is not an issue.

Microsoft and IBM both have remote debuggers, but getting them to work through firewalls can be a challenge. In addition, operations people are always hesitant to allow developers to install debugging software on a production server.

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Enter DebugLive, a Web-based, collaborative, remote Windows debugger. DebugLive attempts to address all of these problems. For now it’s just for 32-bit Windows programs; eventually it will also cover Linux, Mac, AJAX, and 64-bit programs.

I recently had a discussion and hands-on demo with Donis Marshall, DebugLive founder and CEO. A series of screenshots from that demo follows. To see any of these in full size, just click on the image.

More information, demos, and a free trial offer can be found on the DebugLive site.

1_StartingRemoteDebuggingSessionSm.png
Starting a remote debugging session.
2_JoiningRemoteDebuggingSessionSm.png
Joining a remote debugging session.
3_AttachingToRemoteProcessSm.png
Attaching to a remote process.
4_DisplayingCurrentCallstackSm.png
Displaying the current call stack.
5_SteppingThroughSourceCodeSm.png
Stepping through source code.
6_SettingConditionalBreakpointSm.png
Setting a conditional breakpoint.

This article, “Debugging Windows from the Web,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Martin Heller’s Strategic Developer blog and follow the latest news on software development at InfoWorld.com.

Martin Heller

Martin Heller is a contributing writer at InfoWorld. Formerly a web and Windows programming consultant, he developed databases, software, and websites from his office in Andover, Massachusetts, from 1986 to 2010. From 2010 to August of 2012, Martin was vice president of technology and education at Alpha Software. From March 2013 to January 2014, he was chairman of Tubifi, maker of a cloud-based video editor, having previously served as CEO.

Martin is the author or co-author of nearly a dozen PC software packages and half a dozen Web applications. He is also the author of several books on Windows programming. As a consultant, Martin has worked with companies of all sizes to design, develop, improve, and/or debug Windows, web, and database applications, and has performed strategic business consulting for high-tech corporations ranging from tiny to Fortune 100 and from local to multinational.

Martin’s specialties include programming languages C++, Python, C#, JavaScript, and SQL, and databases PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, Google Cloud Spanner, CockroachDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, and Couchbase. He writes about software development, data management, analytics, AI, and machine learning, contributing technology analyses, explainers, how-to articles, and hands-on reviews of software development tools, data platforms, AI models, machine learning libraries, and much more.

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