I have alway tested/debugged my web applications by using f5 to "Start Debugging". Recently (yesterday) I have begun to start without debugging then attach the debugger to the webdev process if I needed to set breakpoints or anything. So far I haven't noticed much of a performance increase when not using the debugger. I am curious about how others save time when running locally. Is it a good idea to only attach the debugger when I need it? Any other options are welcome as well! Thanks!
I don't think you are going to see much of a performance increase. But if you do find yourself frequently attaching to a process manually, you can set up a macro to attach the debugger to whatever process you want to attach to, and then assign the macro to a button or hotkey. I used to do this when debugging old classic asp code, to set up the debugger to attach to IIS.
You can use record macro to create the macro, and then manually edit it if you need to make it more flexible.
Here is a macro I found online you could try as well:
http://weblogs.asp.net/koenv/archive/2008/02/14/quick-attach-and-detach-debugger.aspx
I used to debug like you (i.e. Host the Website in IIS an then attach the debugger) But i've found using Cassini far more productive because of the edit and continue feature, which is an absolute godsend.
iirc webdev == cassini
one other way is to run actual IIS - it's always on, even if you shut down VS, so it may be faster to come up. I am not sure it's actually faster when re-compiling, should be the same or faster. VS2010 supports IIS mode pretty well, plus you get the advantage of being able to test web.config properly, since cassini doesn't support system.webserver portion. We are switching to IIS mode due to url rewriter module, for example.
Related
It may be a silly question but why one would like to attach debugger to IIS instance?
These SOs
Attach Debugger to IIS instance
How do I attach the debugger to IIS instead of ASP.NET Development Server?
show you how to do it but could you let me know what are the benefits of doing this?
One time, in my entire career, we had a web app that started getting strange errors that had us baffled. We tried a dozen things to try and figure out what was wrong, but we were panicking and needed an answer immediately. So, we attached a debugger to the production instance and set up a few watch/break points. It helped us track down the errors and fix the problem.
Naturally, it hung the server during our debugging session, and made people mad, but no more mad than they already were, because of the problem we had.
It would not have been necessary if the code had been written better, with error logging and diagnostic points. I don't expect to ever do it again.
Apart from TimG's post a couple of reasons I can think of are:
To debug the application in a closer representation of its
production environment
To debug on a remote machine
Example, like #TonE #1 -- in order to test a deployed website (with web.config transformations) locally, like if you can't remote debug a live website or just need to test config transforms (since you can't run them in-place):
Open site project from C:\Dev\AwesomeWebSite\AwesomeWebSite.sln
Publish the site to a local folder C:\Webs in Release mode (or Whatever mode)
Set up a local IIS website pointing at the published project
Do stuff on the locally-deployed version (e.g. browse pages, make webservice calls, etc)
Attach VS to w3p.exe (appropriate instance) in order to debug the deployed version
You might be able to effectively do the same thing by instead pointing the Project at your IIS website per this answer.
I'm working on a fairly large ASP.NET web application and I'm taking a big productivity hit when I do work in the interface. I can zip through adding features to the database and API, then I hit the interface and having to recompile and run eats up a lot of my day.
For example if i'm working on a tricky bit that isn't behaving quite right and requires a number of tweaks I'll have to go through multiple [stop/tweak/build/run/log in/navigate back to page] cycles, which really kills my flow and has me staring at the screen with my finger hovering over the hackernews bookmark each time.
I've been fiddling with ways to get around this problem but I haven't improved my situation much. Here's what I've found so far:
visual studio will restart the app frequently when you change static files (js/css/etc), which shouldn't require a restart. If you run VS with IIS express instead this problem goes away.
If I know I have a bunch of messing around to do i'll cut/paste my code into a server script tag on the markup page, run the product, and tweak until it's good, then cut/paste it back. This is annoying because it often requires setting up a number of Imports page declarations and code editing features in ASP.NET files, while better than ever in VS2010, is not as good as in C# files. Plus, it still restarts the app occasionally once enough changes are made.
I can exclude the codebehind file from the web application project, change the "codebehind" attribute in the aspx page declaration to an "src" attribute, then edit the code from there while the app runs (until i make enough changes to trigger a restart.) However now intellisense doesn't work in the codebehind, among other things.
Am I missing something blindingly obvious here, or is development in ASP.NET web applications really supposed to be this slow? Thanks for any solutions you can offer.
I never run my applications through Visual Studio. Set yourself up with IIS and then configure a site to point to the location of your application along with a faux domain. Edit your hosts file to point the domain to localhost.
Then when you want to view your site, just visit the domain that you chose. If you need to modify CSS or script, just make your changes and refresh the page. If you make a code change, compile your app and then refresh the page.
If you need to actually use the Visual Studio debugger, then just attach to the IIS process (application pool name) and your breakpoints will get hit.
I've found a combination of techniques that brings my productivity up a fair bit.
Use an alternative browser like Chrome. When you stop the VS debugger and you're using IE, VS will shut down the browser, but it won't do it with Chrome (or Firefox, or anything else.)
Switched web.config to run in Windows Authentication mode and wrote a quick transparent login routine enclosed in conditional compilation tags (debug only, this feature is not perfect for our production product.)
Now when I'm getting into it I can stop the debugger (which no longer closes the browser,) make code changes, build, optionally start the debugger again, and just hit F5 in Chrome to load the latest. The refresh obviously takes longer since the app has to start up but there's no "run browser/log in/navigate back to the page" task anymore.
Hopefully this will help somebody else in a similar situation.
My company gave me a web application project and I went to debug it and set some breakpoints and they dont fire. I am using Response.Write all over the place to debug. Anyone know what maybe going on?
I am running the application off my localhost I was pushing F5, but since the breakpoints dont hit by making changes and adding Response.Write statements and clicking save then refreshing my browser I get the changes for whatever reason.
Hovering over the breakpoint it says "The breakpoint will not currently be hit the source code differs from the original version"
Another tidbit is I created a new web application project and created a breakpoint and it works, its only specific to this application it seems like, but dont know what it could be?
Hovering over the breakpoint it says "The breakpoint will not currently be hit the source code differs from the original version"
Try this:
Close Visual Studio and make sure any instances of ASP.NET development server are closed as well
Delete everything from "C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\Temporary ASP.NET Files" (where v4.0.30319 is the version of your .NET Framework)
Definitely need more info, but I would check that your are building with debugging symbols to cover the dumb stuff.
Okay, after reading the comments posted on your question I was making the following assumptions.
You are running using the built in VS development server
You are compiling in debug mode
You've set debugging true in your web.config
I've seen this problem before and for me it's been resolved by restarting Visual Studio.
Assuming that you are running on IIS on the same machine that you have visual studio installed:
Have you attached to the application pool process
Is you code the same as what is deploy? (Is the latest version deployed)
Are you logged in as administrator?
Are you running visual studio as administrator?
Just to make sure, you are running in debug mode?
I ran into this problem a while ago as well, instead of using response.write, you could try outputting the data to a label control's text value instead to see the values of your code.
It's a bit of a sloppy work around, but I couldn't figure out why that one particular project I was working on didn't let me debug it.
This problem is, for me, mostly caused by a mismatch of the loaded dll files (symbols) by webserver, and those that the project are pointing to when you try to breakpoint. It's different files. I have located different causes. One could be a simple hang-up by webdev instans (force shutdown. But also that there occur some kind of mismatch if you got different compilation methods between project within same solution as the web project.
This desc may not be your exact problem, but perhaps it will lead you into right direction. I find this often being a dirty unlogic error that just are irritating (but also completely fixable without data loss or reconfiguring, when u understand the trick).
I had the same problem, and it turned out only Internet Explorer works with debugging and breakpoints. To avoid having IE as my default browser, I changed the launch settings in the .Web project to run IE with the path as command line parameters.
I have an puzzling problem. I have a new ASP.NET web application in VS2005 that runs fairly well, but I am having a problem and would like to set a break point to see what is going on. I have compiled the project in Debug mode. I have debug=true set in the web.config. But it appears that the IDE is not attaching to the process at all. Have I overlooked something? I am using the development server and not IIS. This has never been a problem in the past, but is this time.
Have I overlooked anything? Thanks for any help.
Rob
I had this issue a while back with VS2005. I don't remember where I got the following instructions from (copied them to a file which I'm now copying to you) but doing the following steps worked for me. It has something to do with IE8 attaching itself to multiple processes and messing up the debugger. Word of warning, this has you editing the registry, so use at your own risk / take all your normal precautions, etc.
Open RegEdit
Go to HKEY_LOCALMACHINE -> SOFTWARE -> Microsoft -> Internet
Explorer -> Main
Add a dword under this key called TabProcGrowth
Set TabProcGrowth to 0
If you run into the same problem on
Vista or newer, you will also need to
turn off protected mode.
Please note also that I was/am running XP at the time, so I did not have to use the "Vista or newer" clause there. No idea if that has any adverse effects either.
Sorry if I am stating the obvious, but you need to Start Debugging <F5> rather than just running the executable after compiling. Are you doing this?
If you don't hit the breakpoint, you are either not debugging (F5) or your code isn't reached at all. If you want to know which of the two is happening you can throw an exception right at the code where your breakpoint is. If your application is failing at the exception, you know you are not running it with the debugger. If it doesn't fail at the exception you are simply not reaching that piece of code and you will have to look harder for which code you are actually running.
throw new Exception("if I see this exception, I am not running the debugger");
Or maybe you are running two instances of the development server. I've had that sometimes. Look in the Windows system tray for the icon. If you see two (or more) you can right click to stop them and restart debugging.
Basically, what I'm wondering is if I need to set debug="false" before hitting the "Publish Web Site" button or if I can switch it after all the files have been published.
You do not have to turn that setting off, however, you will want to set debug="false" before running the website as a production application. It will have a profound impact on your site's performance.
As to what Ryan wrote - see debug code in production.
Another option you may want to use is retail="true".
You can keep it set to true when you publish/precompile, but once its at a production status, its strongly recommended that you set the value to false, the reasons are here outlined by Scott Guthrie (he manages the ASP.NET team) himself.
Highlights from Scott's post:
Doing so causes a number of non-optimal things to happen including:
1) The compilation of ASP.NET pages takes longer (since some batch optimizations are disabled)
2) Code can execute slower (since some additional debug paths are enabled)
3) Much more memory is used within the application at runtime
4) Scripts and images downloaded from the WebResources.axd handler are not cached
On the production server you could put deployment retail=”true” in machine.config. This will ensure that debug is always false for that server. Details here.
Unfortunately, no. You can publish it with the option set to true, although you certainly should not (if the page is going into production). I publish apps to a test environment initially with it set to 'true', the set it to false in the test environment, and absolutely to false when into production.
But your site will build and publish fine to whatever environment you send it to with the debug set to true. As I understand it, there are a quite a few sites out there that in production with this set that way. Dror posted a great link to the issues that come with leaving this option on.
I hope this adds some value. I have been learning a lot about msbuild, and what a incredible tool it is!
If you are publishing sites to production, there is probably some of the steps that you would like to automate. If you want to use a batch file to do your publish instead of the visual studio interface, or included this in your build scripts, after you have compiled sucessfully the following will publish your website.
msbuild <yourProjectFile>.csproj
/target:"ResolveReferences;_CopyWebApplication"
/properties:"debug=false;
retail=true;
WebProjectOutputDir = <YourCorrectOutputDir>;
OutDir = <YourCorrectOutputDir>\bin\"
The time we have spent in our time, investing in fairly extensive build scripts, that even run a few basic http get reguests against the site after we are done building and publishing it, has reduced a huge amount of frustrations.
I am a firm beleiver of automating as much as possible, machines dont seem to forget to do things as often as I do :D
Hope it helps
Cheers
Rihan