Launching Windows Store App under a Debugger

 

We recently released a .NET Profiler tool for troubleshooting Windows Store Applications on Windows 8 machines. You can download this tool from here. In this blog post, we will talk about how to launch a Windows Store Application under a debugger. 

For regular windows applications, we can launch it from a debugger using File -> Open Executable. But the Windows Store Apps must be launched by other process (something similar to Windows NT Services). How can you attach a debugger at startup ?

We can use NP .NET Profiler tool to attach the debugger at startup. Here are the steps :

1. Download the tool from here
2. Extract the NPStoreApp.zip to c:\temp\np folder
3. Double click on NPStoreApp.exe
4. Select the Windows Store Application from the list box
5. Set the “Profiler Type” to “Run under Debugger (without the profiler)”
6. In the “Profiler Option” enable “Run under Debugger” and browse to your favorite debugger
7. Now, click on the “Start Profiling” button
   • This will launch the Windows Store App under the debugger. The Windows Store App will be paused until we hit the g in the debugger as shown below in the second image. Debugger will be launched in the Desktop and the app will be launched in the modern UI
   • Running under debugger disables process suspension/resumption

 

Click the image for a larger view

 

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 16, 2013
  I failed to run my app with the debugger: exception is IdentityNotMappedException.