Debugging through different solutions in Visual Studio

Solution 1:

There is no way to have two instances of Visual Studio debugging the same process. This is a limitation of Windows, and most other operating systems in that at most one process can be debugging another.

It is a perfectly supported scenario though to debug binaries that are not a part of your solution. As you've noted you can happily step into binaries from Solution B while debugging from a Solution A.

One item that will get in the way here though is the debugging feature named "Just My Code". This is a feature aimed at minimizing the debugging experience to just the code in your solution. It is great for normal solutions, but bad when you're debugging arbitrary binaries. It's likely causing a lot of the problems around break points you're seeing. You'll want to disable it by doing the following

• Menu Tools → Options → Debugging
• Unchecked "Enable Just My Code"

Solution 2:

You can only have one debugger debugging a process at once. So that means you only need one instance of Visual Studio open.

However, you can just open the .cpp/.cs/whatever file from Solution B into Solution A's copy of Visual Studio and set breakpoints. It'll still work even though those files aren't actually part of the solution.

Solution 3:

What if you explicitly load the symbols from Solution A?

If you go to menu Tools → Options → Debugging → Symbols, you can point it at the .pdb file from Solution A.

Then you can see if the symbols are loaded from your binaries by going to menu Debug → Windows → Modules while debugging.