VS2005 Remote Debugging of ASP.NET 2.0

[mtessier]

Hello All,

We’ve been struggling to set up remote debugging of ASP.Net 2.0 in Visual Studio 2005. We don’t have IIS installed on our machines and we still support a lot of classic ASP, so our local ASP.NET development server is not an option. I’ve done a lot of Googling and tried a lot of different things but ultimately I can’t seem to get the ASP.NET worker process to appear in the Attach to Process dialog. No breakpoints are being hit when I attach to the page on the specific iexplore.exe process (works for javascript, but not for server-side code). Here is our technical setup:

- Dev Web Server: Windows Server 2K3 Web Edition, IIS 6, VS2005 Remote Debugger installed
- Client: Win XP Pro, VS2005 Pro
- Both client machines and dev web server are on the domain (I log into the web server through UltraVNC using the same domain account that I log into my machine) and our domain accounts are not administrators on any machines
- Currently need to login (using accounts stored in the database, not domain accounts) thru classic ASP screens to get to ASP.NET screens (we’re still in the early stages of migration to .NET), so direct access is not possible from a security standpoint
- aspx and aspx.vb files are developed as individual files (no web site project) using VS2005 on our client machines through a network share on the dev web server with no direct compile (As an experienced ASP.NET developer who works with developers with classic ASP mentality, I don’t agree with this setup but this is the wrong forum for a political rant!)

Any help would be greatly appreciated, as reliable resources on this subject seem to be hard to find. I’d rather not double the size of my code by putting Trace statements everywhere (this is all too quickly becoming the web development standard here and it scares me!).

Thanks in advance,

Mike

 

[ecannizzo]

Are you running Msvsmon.exe on your dev server first? After that you must open your browser to your website page on your dev server. Then you should see the process in the Attach to process box.

Here is a good link:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/910448

 

[mtessier]

Yes, I am running Msvsmon.exe on the dev web server first. I have tried running it by starting the app from the server (using UltraVNC), I have tried starting it using the Windows Service, and I have tried creating a network share on the "Remote Debugger" folder on the web server and starting it from my machine.

The closest I’ve come is when I did this:
- Created a network share on the "Remote Debugger" folder on the web server and started the debugger from my machine. By default, the “Everyone” group gets Read permission on this share.
- Created the “Debugger Users” group on the web server (as it didn’t exist before) and added my domain account to the group
- Opened our website, logged in, and navigated to an ASP.NET page
- Now if I go to VS2005 and go to Debug -> Attach to Process and specify domain\username@mycomputername as the Qualifier, my domain account appears as connected in the Msvsmon.exe window
- Even after doing this, there is no w3wp.exe or aspnet_wp.exe in the list of Available Processes in the Attach to Process box

Thanks,

Mike