To debug Ant you can enable let ant wait for the debugger to attach, then you may attach to the debugger from Eclipse IDE.

To make a java application wait for debugger to attach the following JVM params have to be passed to it

**-Xdebug -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,server=y,suspend=y,address=1044**

To Ant they may be passed via the environment param ANT_OPTS
After that you can launch the ant applicaion.

cls

$env:ANT_OPTS="-Xdebug -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,server=y,suspend=y,address=1044"
echo ($env:ANT_OPTS)

#ant createXLSFile
ant writeProperties

To attach with the debugger with Eclipse IDE use the Debug COnfiguration and set the Breaking Point, to stop on an uncatched Exception