My colleague, John, was having problems connecting the remote debugger to our SharePoint stage server. When connecting he got an “Access Denied” error. After spending much of the afternoon Googling for a solution, he came up with the following fix.

1. Open an MMC session and add the Component Services snap-in. Alternatively, run “dcomcnfg.exe”
2. Expand “Computers”
3. Right-click on “My Computer” and hit “Properties”
4. In the “Access Permissions” section of the “COM Security” tab, click “Edit Limits”
5. Make sure the entry for ANONYMOUS LOGIN is allowed access to the Local machine
6. Hit “OK”, and you’re done

Very handy thing to know about.