7 Remote Debugging

7.2 Attaching to running processes

The three commands Application > Start, Application > Debug and Application > Interact are all used to launch a program from within Functional Developer. But if the program is running already, perhaps even before you started up the Functional Developer environment, the environment does not know about the process and therefore it has no visible presence in the environment.

The Functional Developer Enterprise Edition allows you to "attach" to such a running process, thereby bringing it under Functional Developer's control just as if it had been started by the environment. It is very simple to do this:

: 1. Open the project whose application, DLL, or control is running.
: 2. Choose Application > Attach... from the project window, or choose Tools > Attach Debugger... from the main window.
: A dialog listing all available running processes appears.
: 3. Select the process to which you want to attach, and click OK.

After a few moments, the debugger attaches to the running process, and all the normal debugging and interaction facilities become available, just as with Application > Start.

Note: Functional Developer does not currently offer any facility for detaching from a process. Once it has been attached to the Functional Developer debugger, and all of your debugging work is finished, you will need to close the program down using the Application > Stop command.

The process to which you attach need not be running on the local machine. You can also attach to a process that is running on a remote machine provided that the debugging server application (see "Starting the debugging server" on page 136) is running on that machine. The process list dialog has an option box that allows you to select the machine whose process list you want to view. There is also an Open New Connection... button for creating new connections to remote machines, which works in the same way as described in "Starting an application remotely" on page 137.