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I am wondering how we are suppose to use the remote debugger on a target machine with Windows XP for applications build using Visual Studio 2013.

It seems that Remote Debug Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 (and 2012) do not install on Windows XP, complaining that they need a newer Windows version. Microsoft download do not say a thing about requirements.

I guess there should be a way of doing it...

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    I'm not sure why Microsoft would be expected to provide remote debug support for an unsupported operating system. It might be nice, but it would also be a bit surprising.
    – John Saunders
    Commented Nov 6, 2013 at 10:42
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    @JohnSaunders Windows XP is still supported until 2014-04-08 so you would expect to have clients using this, and if you have to debug anything... you are out of luck. The inability of doing this with vs2013, vs2012 and maybe even older versions would translate into: don't ever think to upgrade your projects to a newer version of Visual Studio. You end-up in the case where you cannot have both: a supported version of visual studio and the ability to perform remote debug on its output.
    – sorin
    Commented Nov 6, 2013 at 11:43
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    No, it's not "supported". It's on "extended support", which means little more than security fixes. See Microsoft Support Lifecycle and expand "Support Lifecycle Policy". You'll see that "Extended Support" includes security updates and paid support. Only. Don't be confused by the fact that the phrase "Extended support" has the word "support" in it.
    – John Saunders
    Commented Nov 6, 2013 at 15:26

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Here is the document on Visual Studio 2013 Compatibility and it does state that Remote Debugging and profiling tools are not available for the targeted platforms of XP and Vista.

Most likely the reason that the Remote Tools for Visual Studio 2012 and 2013 do not run on XP is that XP does not support .NET 4.5.

Target your app for .NET 4 so you can run it on the XP platform, and use Visual Studio 2013 to do the majority of the coding and then use Visual Studio 2010 to do the remote debugging when needed. VS 2010 and 2013 can run side by side and the project formats are compatible so you should be able to go back and forth very easily.

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  • That's not a .NET solution but thanks, I will try the vs2010 approach and see if this works.
    – sorin
    Commented Nov 7, 2013 at 10:01
  • VS2013 uses a newer project/solution format version, so VS2010 will likely no open a solution created with it.
    – ivan_pozdeev
    Commented Dec 2, 2017 at 3:58

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