Debugging Maximo Anywhere Windows applications with Visual Studio

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I thought I would start off this year blogging about a product I work with quite a bit and that is Maximo Anywhere, a mobile solution for Maximo Asset Management,  which is currently at version 7.6.1. If you want more information on the product you can find it here.  The Windows applications that were introduced starting with Maximo Anywhere 7.5.2.1 are supported on both Windows 8.1 and 10 (as of Anywhere 7.6), but can also be built from both those as well as Windows 2012 Server R2. 

So what if you don't have access to the devices yet and want to get a look and feel of the app or debug some issues on the Windows 2012 R2 build machine?  This can be done fairly easily for iOS with xCode and Android using the Chrome browsers inspect feature, but how do we accomplish this for Windows?  The answer is with Visual Studio, which should already be install on your build machine, whether it be Windows 2012 R2, Windows 8.1 or Windows 10, the following steps will work for each.

So what do you need installed to start debugging the Windows Solutions?

1.  The Windows Desktop experience must be installed.  (This is added through Windows Server Manager as a feature)

2.  An account that IS NOT the 'Built-In Administrator'

3.  Visual Studio Community Edition 2013, 2015 or equivalent.

4.  A Windows Developer License enabled on the build machine.

5.  The application should be built and deployed to the MobileFirst console to allow for login to happen.

Once the prerequisites are met we can open the solution for one of our Anywhere applications,  you can do this by opening visual studio and then opening the file or browsing directly to the solution and double clicking on it.  For this example we will use the Inspections application. 

1. Proceed to the following folder and open the solution file in Visual Studio.

2. Once the file is open, you will want to change the mode to 'Debug',  architecture to x64 or the architecture you are building for and then set it to run on 'Local Machine'  as seen below.

Once you click on the play symbol it will deploy the solution and open your application in a new Window.  You can log in to the device and download data and work as normal,  any exceptions will appear in the javascript console, breakpoints can be set as well as other helpful information is displayed.

As I mentioned this can be done from the build machine but Visual Studio can also be installed to the devices to allow for device specific debugging.  Remote debugging is also an option if a full version of Visual Studio can not be installed on the device.  I hope this helps those out there troubleshooting or testing Windows Applications for Maximo Anywhere.  Any comments questions or concerns please feel free to comment below.