What to do when attach to process doesn’t work

When using Visual Studio, you can attach to a running process that’s chocked full of debug info (or not, but there’s not much point if it’s not) by selecting Build | Start Debug | Attach To Process…

This can handle cases where a problem doesn’t happen under the IDE, but does when running a debug executable. As happened to me recently. So, with the app running and the problem reproduced, I wanted to debug. But, when the dialog pops up it might be distressingly empty – as it was for me. What to do?

From task manager, right (context) click on the process and select Debug. That will launch your debugger and away you go.