WinGDB for Mobile Systems

WinGDB for Mobile Systems is a special edition of WinGDB targeted at mobile systems development. Currently it supports Android system.

Documentation is available here - section "Development for Android system".

Any feedback is greatly appreciated.

Features

Integration with Visual Studio project management: you can manage your projects and source files in similar way as regular Visual Studio projects.
The whole Android project structure described in AndroidManifest.xml file, as well as native subproject structure, are visible in Solution Explorer window. All manifest properties are editable. Components (e.g. activities, services, etc.) may be added/removed. Currently only activities can be debugged.
Building the projects with standard NDK-build system. WinGDB works directly with *.mk and *.xml files used by NDK-build, so that it is interoperable with other tools. No conversions are required. In addition, WinGDB adds its own project file (wgaproj) that contains a small amount of its own metadata.
Building and deployment of Android packages (APK) by utilising standard Android tools.
Debugging applications on an Android emulator (AVD). Both launching activities and attaching to existing ones is supported. Most Visual Studio debug windows and features can be used.
Debugging on physical devices. Need not to be rooted. The reference device is the Nexus One. Currently we stated testing also on NVIDIA's development kits Ventana (dual core) and Cardhu (quad core). Since WinGDB uses only standard SDK tools (adb), theoretically any device with suitable drivers should work.
Limited Java support. In current version there is a possibility to edit Java files (with syntax coloring), so that you can fix small bugs, build the project and test the result. An experimental version of Java debugger has also been included in current release. Debugging sessions may be started either for native or Java code. Mixed Java/C++ debugging is a work in progress.
Device monitor. A special window allowing to examine the state of connected Android device or emulator. There are mulitple pages, presenting different aspects of the state: running processes, installed packages, CPU information, CPU cores availability, active services, system properties, etc. Many pages have additional options available in a right-click menu, e.g. uninstalling packages, examining detailed process information, killing processes, etc. New pages and options are being added on each release.

Known problems

Here are the most important problems:

IntelliSense does not work: this is due to limitations of Visual Studio Extensibility. We currently have a plan how to solve this problem. The solution has been postponed due to more important issues, but should be implemented in the first half of 2012.
ADB tool (Android Debug Bridge) is itself buggy and sometimes hang. Typically it can happen while deploying the package. WinGDB has a watchdog timer to prevent infinite hang of Visual Studio (60 seconds, can be altered in Preferences). If the deploy process freezes for a significantly longer time than usual, use 'Restart ADB Server' option from WinGDB menu, or find and terminate all ADB processes using the task manager.
Android SDK/NDK should not be installed a directory whose path contains spaces. Otherwise various problems may occur. This is a problem of NDK itself. Other tools seem to work with spaces in paths.
When debugging on a device, you might get an error saying "unable to bind address". If it happens, set a different port in Debug section in project properties. Ports with larger number have greater chance to work. Alternative solution is to set the Debugger transport mode to "Pipe".
Sometimes the debugging session may fail with similar message as above, due to DDMS running in background. Android applications allow only one debugging tool to be connected and when DDMS acquires the slot, it disallows all other tools. A solution is to close DDMS before starting debugging.
When you make modifications and start debugging session immediately, sometimes Visual Studio does not initiate Deploy step (so that the project is rebuilt but not deployed). This problem should be addressed in the next version.
There are problems when debugging on multicore CPUs due to low-level bugs in NDK debugging tools. Known devices affected are all NVIDIA Tegra based multicore devices. The workaround is to disable extra cores. It can be done using the Device Monitor window (Cores page). For Tegra devices you also must use Tegra development pack from NVIDIA, standard SDK+NDK will not work.
Killing processes from Device Monitor currently works on rooted devices only.
Do not use several different versions of Android SDK at once, for example one version configured in WinGDB, and another to launch tools from the command line. This can lead to unpredictable results, including hangs of a debug session. This is because ADB runs system-wide process to coordinate multiple connections, and this process is killed (with all these connections) when launch of conflicting SDK tool is detected. ADB gives very little diagnostics for this case and WinGDB has no possibility to react properly. Just don't do it :)