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