By now you will have heard the exciting news that Visual Studio 2015 supports C++ development on Android (and that includes an Emulator for Android).
Obviously no development experience is complete without debugging support, so this means that Visual Studio 2015 supports debugging C++ code running on Android. With this new debug engine, the debugging experience you’ll get includes (but is not limited to):
F5, Output window, Breakpoints, Step Into/Over/Out, Run To Cursor, Call Stack, Data and Variable windows, Modules window, Address level debugging (Disassembly, Memory, Registers windows), Threads window, and Parallel Stacks and Parallel Watchwindows.
Below is a screenshot showing Visual Studio stopped at a breakpoint in C++ code for an Android app. You can see in the processes window the “Debugging” column shows “Native (GDB-based)” indicating this is Visual Studio’s GDB based debug engine for Android.
In Visual Studio 2015 Preview, it is worth noting the following limitations for C++ debugging
- Debugging requires Android 4.2 or above (Jelly Bean—API level 17)
- Stop debugging does not kill the app (it remains running)
Additionally the following debugger functionality is not supported:
- 64-bit processes
- Changing exception settings in the Exceptions window
- Hexadecimal display of integers
- Breakpoint binding to multiple locations (e.g. templates, files with the exact same name)
- Android thread names do not appear in the Threads window
- Show parameter values in the Call Stack window
- Attach to process
- Autos window
- Return values
- Interop debugging with JIT’d runtimes (e.g. Java or Xamarin)
- Just My Code
- Edit and Continue
- Tasks window (including Tasks view in the Parallel Stacks window)
Source : http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudioalm/archive/2014/11/12/debugging-c-code-on-android-with-visual-studio-2015.aspx
