Does Cloud Service (Extended Support) support Remote Debugging?

Jake Lunn (Valorem LLC) 1

I see no reference to this functionality in the documentation and my test deployment doesn't appear to have any options for it. Was this dropped in the migration from Cloud Service (classic) to Cloud Service (extended support) ?

Monalla-MSFT 11,961 Reputation points

2021-05-26T13:57:50.82+00:00

@Jake Lunn (Valorem LLC) - Thanks for reaching out. We are looking into this and will get back to you shortly.

1 answer

Monalla-MSFT 11,961 Reputation points

2021-06-01T17:15:24.86+00:00

@Jake Lunn (Valorem LLC) - Thanks for reaching out and being patient.

Cloud Services doesn't support Remote Debugging.

It is complicated by the fact that in order to attach a debugger in Classic, the user would navigate via Server Explorer / Azure Node in Visual Studio 2017/2019. This tool window is RDFE based and has been deprecated in VS 2022. We don’t have an equivalent for an explorer using ARM in VS2022 either, since Cloud Explorer tool window is also being deprecated based on low usage and high maintenance costs. So, if this feature is required, we would need to design and implement a new experience for how one would select the instance they want to debug.

Can you provide us with more info on how many customers do you have that are using this feature?

For more information on Cloud Services Support, please look at this document - Cloud Services Overview

Please let us know if you have any further questions regarding the same. Again, thank you for being patient while we worked on getting your query resolved.
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Mark Horrocks 6 Reputation points

2021-06-10T09:51:54.903+00:00

@Monalla-MSFT I'd be grateful if the online documentation could be updated to clarify this point. I have just spent more than a day trying to get this working, what with the conflicting historical documentation, and constantly changing terminology and feature set.

Similar to @Jake Lunn (Valorem LLC) i think this is an important feature, which was present for classic and is present for other deployment models. In my case, my application works in the local emulator but does not work when deployed to Azure. Without debugging, how can I find out why?

Jake Lunn (Valorem LLC) 1 Reputation point

2021-06-11T14:06:04.717+00:00

Thank you and I appreciate the detailed reply. I understand that the Server Explorer is being deprecated with no alternative and that makes it difficult to support this feature. Would it be possible to configure either an Extension for the VMs (similar to enabling RDP) or access the load balancer to allow the ports to be opened to allow remote debugging?

I would think the following steps would be possible for enabling remote debugging:

Install the RDP Extension for the VMs

RDP into a VM

On the remote VM, Install the VS 2019 (or other versions) Remote Debugger tool (following these instructions: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/debugger/remote-debugging?view=vs-2019#bkmk_setup)

On the developer's machine, attach to the debugger instance via Debug > Attach to Process... menu

At this point I think the only blocker is that the Load Balancer would need to unblock the Port number necessary for the connection to the remote debugger. Is that true?

Monalla-MSFT 11,961 Reputation points

2021-06-17T00:48:46.033+00:00

@Jake Lunn (Valorem LLC) , @Mark Horrocks - Thank you for providing more information.

I have reached out to product team to see if they can add the above mentioned feature and this is what i was told that they have added this to the backlog to investigate and see what they can do. Ideally they would enable this during Publish and then rely on the debug ->Attach to process as mentioned since they don’t have the explorer. They can’t get to it right away as they have a couple higher priorities, but will get to it as soon as possible.

Hope this helps.

Please feel free to "Accept as Answer" if the above response helped.
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