Cannot use Visual Studio 2012 remote debugger from inside VM

Question

I've seen a variety of questions (like this) which relate to my issue, but none that specifically address my scenario.

I'm running a Windows 8 VM inside VMWare Fusion on my Mac. The VM has shared network, filesystem, etc through the NAT network adapter.

As I'm building an app using Visual Studio 2012, I'd like to do some remote debugging on my Windows Surface tablet (WinRT)... and I have installed the remote debugging tools on the Surface.

However, Visual Studio (running inside the VM) can never see the Surface as a CPU running on the network subnet.

Any ideas? I've even tried physically connecting the computers with USB/Ethernet adapters, but the Surface won't let me install the firmware.

Answer 1

As long as the visual studio debugger can see the surface's IP that should be good enough. They don't need to be on the same subnet (although it makes it a ton easier, they cannot be NAT'd as far as I am aware but that's a better question for Microsoft directly). The best that I can recommend would be to switch from shared to bridge for your networking, that should put your Win 8 VM on an actual IP on the same subnet. Otherwise you might be able to try IPv6... but I don't know how well that will work with VMware.