Why DebugView Does Not Show Debugging Messages When Visual Studio Does

Question

I am developing a browser helper object that works inside Internet Explorer. I am writing debugging messages using ATLTRACE("..."); They seem great when Visual Studio connects to the iexplore.exe process, but it's slow for a quick test. DebugView doesn't commit anything from my BHO.

Why doesn't DebugView show BHO debugging messages? How does it work with low-integrity Internet Explorer?

Answer 1

Assuming you are using IE in Vista or later (which is similar to what you are talking about integrity levels), you can set the DebugView integrity level to lower integrity so that any application can send messages to it:

 icacls dbgview.exe /setintegritylevel low 

And if you don’t like the idea of ​​constantly setting dbgview to low integrity (this can make the logs persist and it’s a little painful, since they will only go into the low integrity storage), you can run a specific instance of dbgview with low integrity using the Sysinternals tool psexec :

 psexec -l dbgview 

Finally, if all that bothers you is the time it takes to load the VS debugger to join the process, you can use the command line debugger (for example, ntsd.exe or cdb.exe). Ntsd.exe ships with Windows, but a newer version comes with the Debugging Tools for Windows package, which also includes a very similar cdb.exe file.

Answer 2

Is Visual Studio still working for your quick tests? If so, this may cause this problem.