is MDBG (Managed debugger) for .NET free to use for commercial purposes?

Question

i am making a project. for that i need to use a debugger. obsly MDBG is my first choice. but as i downloaded the sample and read the eula. it states that

You may not use the software for commercial software hosting services.

but this eula is for

MICROSOFT CLR MANAGED DEBUGGER (MDBG) SOURCE SAMPLE

so my ques is can i use it or cant i?

Answer 1

You may not use the software for commercial software hosting services.

That was a boilerplate phrase that appeared in all Microsoft EULAs several years ago. I haven't seen it lately, but MDBG dates from the time that this phrase was common. The specific exclusion is that you can't use Microsoft tools or code samples to build a web site and then re-sell the service to 3rd parties. Nothing particularly nefarious, at the time they probably thought that web hosting was an important business segment for them and they didn't want to have to compete with anybody using their own tools to build such a hosting service.

Take note of this when you plan to create your own kind of GoDaddy with a traceable way for anybody to see that you used the MDBG sample code to run your service. The intersection of Microsoft still caring about that with the odds that MDBG will actually be useful in a hosting service is sufficiently small to not worry about this. And of course, never take legal advice from a programmer's Q+A site :)

Answer 2

MDbg is part of the .NET Framework SDK, which is free.

The MDbg sample is the source code, which aparently you are not allowed to integrate in 'commercial software hosting services.' You are still allowed to use MDbg for debugging any project.

VS has a great debugger. VS Express is free and is quite powerful. You shouldn't have to use a commandline debugger.