Quick tutorial on debugging the MIEngine

This wiki page will give a quick overview on how you can get started digging into the source code of the MIEngine. In this tutorial, we are going to debug an Android native C++ project, as support for these are already built into Visual Studio. If you are interested in modifying the MIEngine to target some other platform, this tutorial is still probably useful to you so that you can see how to quickly test your code for the Android scenario.

Setup steps:

1. Install Visual Studio on a real computer (not a VM). Running it under parallels on a Mac should work also. Running it inside of a Hyper-V VM will not.

2. Make sure that Android C++ support is enabled in Visual Studio 2015 setup. If you didn't do this or you aren't sure --

   • Open Window's Control Panel
   • Open the Programs and Features applet
   • Find Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 in the list
   • Right click and invoke 'Change'
   • Click the Modify button
   • Make sure these are checked (NOTE: the names were a bit different in Visual Studio 2015 RC, so look around if you are using that build)
     • Programming Languages -> Visual C++ -> Common Tools for Visual C++
     • Cross Platform Mobile Development -> Visual C++ Mobile Development
     • Cross Platform Mobile Development -> Microsoft Visual Studio Emulator for Android

3. If you haven't already done so, clone the MIEngine repository

Steps:

1. Start your main instance of Visual Studio, and open MIDebugEngine.sln

2. In solution explorer, find the MIDebugEngine project, and open Engine.Impl\DebuggedProcess.cs

3. Find the Initialize method of the class, and set a breakpoint

4. Hit F5 to start debugging. This will launch an experimental instance of Visual Studio.

5. In the experimental instance, File -> New Project, Visual C++ -> Cross Platform -> Native-Activity Application (Android)

6. In the experimental instance, open main.cpp from the created project

7. In the experimental instance, go to the android_main method, and set a breakpoint

8. In the experimental instance, hit F5 to start debugging. The Android emulator should startup. This will be slow the first time, but should be subsequently fast

9. Your breakpoint in DebuggedProcess.Initialize will hit. You can step through and see the commands that are being sent to GDB if you like. If you open the output window in your main Visual Studio instance, you can also see all the commands that we sent and the response/events that came back.

10. Hit F5 from this breakpoint and see your experimental instance stop at a breakpoint as well.