{"id":6026,"date":"2014-05-06T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-05-06T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/azure.microsoft.com\/blog\/introduction-to-remote-debugging-on-azure-web-sites"},"modified":"2025-09-12T09:35:35","modified_gmt":"2025-09-12T16:35:35","slug":"introduction-to-remote-debugging-on-azure-web-sites","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/azure.microsoft.com\/en-us\/blog\/introduction-to-remote-debugging-on-azure-web-sites\/","title":{"rendered":"Introduction to Remote Debugging on Azure Web Sites"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This post was written by Jaime Espinosa, Program Manager on the Azure Web Sites Team<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With the availability of Remote Debugging, Microsoft brings you a cohesive and unified web development experience from beginning to end.  Microsoft Visual Studio can connect and interact with the cloud as if the whole cloud is sitting right under your desk.  Web developers can create, publish and debug Azure-hosted websites all from a single development environment.  The integration of Visual Studio and Azure Websites speeds up development and helps reduce bugs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 includes many improvements to how developers interact with the debugger.  Debugging is an important part of the overall design flow whether you are learning to develop or have many years of experience. Website remote debugging can be done with Visual Studio 2012, but there are many improvements to debugging with Visual Studio 2013. For more information see the Visual Studio product page<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Azure Websites Remote Debugging connects two of Microsoft\u2019s most powerful technologies, the Azure cloud and Visual Studio.  You can connect Visual Studio to your own Azure Website and gain full control.  You can set breakpoints, manipulate memory directly, step through code and even change the code path.  It\u2019s the only way to truly see how your website behaves in the wild.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The ability to do remote debugging makes a big difference in rapid development. It facilitates maintenance and enables folks to create better sites.  There is a lot of power and flexibility in Visual Studio as a tool for this remote debugging.  Hopefully with some background context on how everything works, you can make the best use of the tool and feature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Remote Debugging in Azure Web Sites<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

There are two ways to connect to the Remote Debugger session on Azure Web Sites: manually or automatically.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To get the most out of any tool and especially a debugging tool, it is worth knowing how it all works. We will go into more details about how the Remote Debugger works in the 2nd<\/sup> part of this series. Later on, in part 3, we will address users who have expanded their websites to scale out to multiple instances as well as using GIT to deploy and maintain your website.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are countless additional articles, blogs and tutorials on how to use Visual Studio\u2019s Remote Debugger in general.  I encourage you to explore, experiment and share.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What\u2019s next?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

There are a few things worth mentioning, based on customer questions we have seen.  We plan to provide a way to route traffic away from the instance being debugged, manually and\/or automatically. The ability to attach and step into a process on startup is being investigated, but it\u2019s not conclusive.  The Windows user-name restrictions have been fixed; which used to be constrained to <20 characters).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tier Limits<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Remote debugging is available to all tiers; however, there are some limitations depending on the tier.  The breakdown is as follows: Free<\/strong> and Shared<\/strong> (Basic) tiers are allowed one connection at any given time.  The Standard<\/strong> tier is allowed five simultaneous connections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Warning Sticker<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Unfortunately, we must leave you with a warning sticker; but, we are working to remove it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Connecting the Visual Studio Remote Debugger to Azure Web Sites<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

It is possible to attach the Visual Studio Remote Debugger in two different ways; manually and automatically.  The manual procedure works with Visual Studio 2012 and 2013 out of the box (it is not available in Express versions).  The automatic procedure is much simpler, but does require that the client machine has the Azure SDK<\/a> installed, and the subscription profile downloaded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Being able to manually attach a remote debugger to an arbitrary process has many benefits.  Not only can you debug the website process (W3WP), but you can also debug processes on WebJobs<\/a>or any other kind of process ran in Azure Web Sites.  Visual Studio and its debugger are built for .NET, but VS offers a lot of flexibility that extends to additional tools.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the other hand, the Azure SDK<\/a>, brings a more cohesive website development and maintenance story.  From a single tool (Visual Studio) you can author, deploy, and remote debug a website with minimal effort.  This is very useful when doing rapid development and\/or when you are managing a large number of websites.  The SDK is always evolving to bring a simple and cohesive experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Regardless of which method you choose, there are some things that need to happen that you should be aware of on the server side.  The Remote Debugging feature needs to be turned on, and the version of Visual Studio needs to be defined on your Web Site\u2019s configuration in Azure.  To better understand how this all works, please find the blog on \u201cInside Remote Debugger in Azure Web Sites (Azure Web Sites)\u201d.<\/em> <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Steps for Connecting Automatically<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

There are several blogs on Azure Websites Remote Debugging that you may want to check out, including a video from the developer that brought us this feature.  Rather than providing yet another example, I\u2019ll refer you to these materials:<\/p>\n\n\n\n