Wow! So I tried remote debugging today with Visual Studio 2005, and let me say, I sure do appreciate REALbasic's remote debugger more. Don't get me wrong, I like our remote debugger (especially since I wrote it!). But after trying out the VS one, holy crap...
First off, there's like 10 pages of firewall exceptions you have to put into both the source and target machines. Fine, ok, whatever. I ended up just disabling the firewalls because it was easier that way.
But then... I realized that I had no stub on the target machine. After 15 minutes of googling, I realized that everything out there seemed to have the whole damned IDE in both places. I thought that was crazy, so I just found the remote debugging service on my Vista machine and dragged the entire folder of crap to my XP machine (which was really a virtual PC). Ran it over there. Great, it worked.
So far, I'm not too saddened.
Then I try to remote debug. Oops, it can't find the target file to remote debug. This perplexes me since it just built the target file! From what I've been able to gather, the remote debugger... doesn't... transfer... the.. built...executable to be debugged! I actually had to manually move the file over to the XP machine. After doing that little head-scratching dance, remote debugging finally worked. And was slow, as, hell.
Needless to say, I got my problem debugged remotely, and I'm glad I at least know how to do it. But I am in love with the REALbasic remote debugger again because of it. It just works.
Yes, for all of our griping about the debugger's shortcomings, it really is an amazing piece of work!
In my experience, OS X to Win XP remote debugging in RB is a dream come true.
I can't imagine trying to do a cross-platform app without it.
I love the remote debugger but I'm finally having the slow-Linux-tranfer issue. I'm thinking the trick might be to keep the stub minimized. Otherwise I need to jiggle the arrow around to speed things up.