How Debug a WinService on a Remote Server

No, the logging will work exactly where you need it: on the part of code executing before the failure. Good idea, just try it out. It's a matter of making the logging fine-grain and focusing on initialization parts of code.
—SA

There are two different ways to debug a service application. You could use any one of two ways to debug.



1. The Remote Debugging Monitor (msvsmon.exe) is a small application that Visual Studio connects to for remote debugging. It is a tool in C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\Remote Debugger\x86. For detailed information about using it. See How to: Run the Remote Debugging Monitor.



2. We run with ntsd.exe is in the command line. There’s also a way to use immediate window to type the command for using ntsd(a MSDN document here).

For detailed information about using ntsd.exe in the command line, see this blog : http://urosv.blogspot.com/2010/05/remote-debugging-with-windbg-and-ntsd.html



So they are different ways to debug a service application. We could use all of the two ways to debug your server app.