WinGDB will not work with Express Editions of Visual Studio, since these versions are not intended to be extensible and have no required interfaces.
There is also new Visual Studio Code edition, introduced along with Visual Studio 2015. It is not compatible with regular Visual Studio plugins. WinGDB also will not work with this edition.
Caution: for Visual Studio 2019 update 16.1 or later, you need to enable certain option in Visual Studio settings, as described in this section.
To achieve best results, use the newest version of GDB that your WinGDB version has been tested on. For current WinGDB release, the best one is GDB 6.8, or 7.5. GDB 7.1 has reported performance problems and is not recommended. GDB 7.3 is known to be buggy on some systems. Some advanced features (like Visualizers) are available only with GDB 7.x.
Generally it's also possible to use older versions, although some features might not work correctly because of bugs present in older versions of GDB. We recommend to upgrade to at least 6.8.
Your remote host must allow SSH connections, using SSH, SCP and optionally SFTP protocols. SFTP is not required, although recommended. WinGDB may not work with some Unix systems without SFTP.
You must also have an account with appropriate rights to run the software you plan to debug. For graphical user interface software you will also need a X-server (you can use freeware X-ming for instance). Please see section Launching X11 processes for instructions how to configure your X display for launching processes with WinGDB.
There is no aditional software required, except standard Linux utilities and commands (shell, ps, kill). WinGDB uses only basic shell commands, the GDB itself, and SSH protocols to transmit data. It allows you to connect to almost any host and start debugging, if only you're able to log in on it using e.g. putty. However, certain shells (notably csh and tcsh) are not supported. The bash shell is recommended.
In order to develop programs for embedded/mobile Linux you must have appropriate toolchain installed. Currently WinGDB supports CodeSourcery G++ Lite toolchain for ARM. We plan to add support for more toolchains and architectures in the future.
Usually a toolchain requires certain files to be installed on the device. Please consult toolchain documentation for more information. Section Embedded Linux development contains more information on WinGDB configuration.