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Warren Postma · Guest

I am trying to debug a COM/DCOM server, it is both a native COM and
automation server (dispinterface), out of process EXE server.

It starts fine, and the client connects fine, but I am having some
problems with the data not getting returned to the calling program (DCOM
client).

I can't debug the server executable by running in the Delphi IDE
debugger, because the program stops at a software breakpoint, at first
connection, and continuously hundreds of times.

The ntdll.DbgBreakPoint appears to be a DLL entry point in a MS dll,
this is where it stops. There is an INT 3 (software interrupt)
instruction, the intent of which is to bring up the debugger. I did some
googling around and found that this usually means that (a) I'm running
Microsoft Beta code, or (b) that the MS DLL that called
ntdll.DbgBreakPoint has encountered some serious error and has decided
to use this mechanism to raise an exception so it can bail out.

Just to see if Delphi can debug an out of process COM automation server,
I decided to try running the delphi 7 DEMO client and server apps,
located in ..Delphi7DemosActiveXOleAutoAutoServ and sure enough,
they work just fine.

So it's some aspect of this server application (which implements the OPC
foundation Data Server 2.0 interfaces, www.opcfoundation.org) renders
it incompatible with the debugger. I am using the sOPC code library
that is from this page: http://www.opcconnect.com/delphi.php

Any idea how to debug this kind of problem?

Regards,

Warren Postma