Remote debugging in Visual Studio, target on a different domain

My computer is a Windows 7 32bits and I had to debug a ASP.NET 32 bit worker process running on a Windows Server 2008 64 bit machine.

The server is in a VPN and in a domain.

What I did was, on the server, I first ran this tool:

Start\Programs\Microsoft Visual Studio 2010\Visual Studio 2010 Remote Debugger (x86)

Make sure your user has permissions to debug the apps, so you can go to Tools\Options and click on Permissions. Your user should have Debug permission.

The tool says “Msvmon started  a new server  named ‘JohnDoe@VMXXXXXX. Waiting for connections’.

Now, in Visual Studio 2010 on my machine, I went to “Debug\Attach to Process” and in Qualifier, I put JohnDoe@XX.XX.XX.XX where XX.XX.XX.XX is the IP of the server. Note that I didn’t use the ‘JohnDoe@VMXXXXXX’. It didn’t work for me.

Two things worth mentioning:

1. you need to have the same user and password on the local machine. I created a separate account on my machine for this.

2. you cannot debug 64 bit processes from a 32 bit machine. Luckily, my processes were running as 32 bit processes so I could debug them.