On the Windows IIS blog today Don Raman looks at debugging WinCache (the Windows caching tool with hooks into PHP) with Visual Studio - Basic in the FastCGI version on IIS.

I am planning to write a series of blog post which will be helpful in debugging WINCACHE. This is just the beginning. So please be patient and forgive me if some of the posts sound for novice user. All my post will assume that you are debugging PHP CGI running under IIS using FastCGI. This means using the non thread safe version of PHP/WINCACHE and IIS running PHP files successfully. I believe the same can be applied to thread safe version of WINCACHE/PHP running under Apache but I do not guarantee that.

He mentions his build environment, what you'll need as far as software to debug and the WinCache source to build from. He includes brief instructions on building WinCache (vis Visual Studio) and how to set up the debugging for the PHP CGI. You can then attach the debugger in Visual Studio to the CGI instance and keep a watchful eye on it. You could also use the Windows Debugging Tools to do most of the same work.