I have three Silverlight 3 applications in the same solution. In my asp.net hosting project I have a seperate page for all three projects. When I navigate between the pages, the only Silverlight breakpoints that get hit are the ones the initial page I load.
This problem has only started recently. I used to be able to debug between all silverlight projects at the same time. Any ideas? I have deleted the ClientBin folder, I have deleted all files and re-retrieved from source control. Nothing seems to be working.
"The problem has only started recently". What changed? Here are some guesses:-
You upgraded to Windows 7
You installed some more memory
Some other memory guzzling app is no longer running when you are testing.
By default IE8 will run multiple processes at least 2. One for the browser frame and one for the content of the intial tab. As you open more windows and tabs IE may add new processes to the set it is currently using.
When you debug VS will launch an new IE8 session and will attach to the process handling the content of the single tab that is open, (it doesn't bother attaching to the parent frame process). However as you navigate about your application IE8 will start new process that VS won't be attached to. This forces you to open the Attach to Process dialog and do it manually.
You can control this IE8 feature (called BTW LCIE, Loosely Coupled IE) from the Registry.
In the Key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main add a new DWORD value TabProcGrowth. Set its value to 1. Now IE8 will only ever create 2 processes per session one for the frame and one for all the tab and window contents which is the one the VS will attach to.
This perhaps is a bit draconian if you also use IE8 as your general browser. One option is to leave IE8 for test purposes and use another browser for general browsing. Another option is a variation of the above. Instead of creating TabProcGrowth as a DWORD create it as a string type instead and set is value to "small". In this mode IE8 is much less aggressive in the number of processes it will open. Of course you could create a couple of scripts to create and delete the registry entry.
Note without the registry entry IE8 uses its own hueristics that depends on available memory etc to determine if a new process is warrented or not. This might explain why in the past your debugging worked and that for apparently no reason it stopped working.
Here was the issue:
One of my child windows had a Silverlight that calling a .Net Ria Service. The service call ended in an error.
The next time several I debugged, the debugger did not attach to the child windows. I had to attach to the child windows manually.
I fixed the Ria Service call so that it did not end in an error. And had to manually attach to the child windows in that debugging session. However in subsequent debugging sessions, the debugger automatically attached.
I tried breaking the Ria Service call and I had to manually attache again. What is a little weird is that closing Visual Studio and even rebooting the machine does not make Visual Studio automatically attach again. You have to have a debugging session where the child window make a sucessful call to a Ria Service to fix it.
NOTE:
The RIA error that was breaking my debugger was caused by a misspelled include in the domain query (ie...
return Context.SOME_ENTITY.Include("Misspelled_Association_Property");
) not all RIA exceptions cause this problem.
My scenario has a number of specific cases that I will go over. I don't have all the things handy to test a more general scenario, but I will when I finish my project unless someone does this first.
Here is what I have:
I am using the a LinqToEntitiesDomainService from the July 2009 Preview release of .Net RIA Services.
To complicate things a little more, since my application is using an Oracle backend, I am using DevArt's dotConnect Entities provider as the EntityFramework model for my domain service.
When I get time, I will try this on the Nov 2009 RIA and a standard SQL backend and EF to see if I still have the same issue. If this is the case I will report it to Microsoft as a visual studio bug.
Related
We are developing an (internal) web service based on asp.net 4.8, with a fairly extensive REACT SPA front end.
For debugging purposes during development, we run an IIS server on the local (development) machine, and we do something separate to run a proxy web server for debugging the .js front end SPA (not relevant to the question at hand).
When we start up a Debug session in Visual Studio (2019), VS starts with "Contacting web server to start debugging" and then locks for a time. It clearly does something to start the web server (w3wp.exe), and waits for some reply, before doing what it is told to do in the "Start Action" section of the Web tab on the project properties page.
This is problematic behaviour because it does not attach to w3wp.exe until after it finishes it's "contacting web server to start debugging" operation. This is a huge problem, as our w3wp.exe starts doing all kinds of things that we have no visibility into.
So, can anyone explain to me:
What does VS actually do to "contact the web server"?
Can this be controlled? If so, how?
Can I get the debugger to attach to w3wp.exe right away?
Why does w3wp.exe start up and load its collection of binaries, only unload them and reload them, sometime multiple times?
In short, what the actual heck is going on under the covers at startup?
This (Identity Server 3 Contacting the web server hangs when launching debug mode) question and answer seem irrelevant to my situation
I note the field Override application root URL in the Servers section of the Web tab of the project properties and had hoped this might have something to do with it, but I cannot see any relation.
Partial answers that I will either edit as I find more info, or modify if others correct me, or delete if someone answers completely. The answers to (1) and (2) above are this:
VS obtains the URL of the target web site (I will call this targetServer) from the Project URL entry in the Servers section, Web tab, of the Properties page for the web project. This actually comes from the <webProjectName>.csproj.user file in the project directory. Depending on the selection of the drop down specifying the server type to use, it comes from:
IIS server (<UseIIS>true): the <IISUrl> element
External Host (<UseCustomServer>true): the <CustomServerUrl>
IIS Express: unknown
WARNING: When opening a project with <UseIIS>true, Visual Studio has the very nasty habit of interfering in the setup of your IIS server: it insists on changing the "Physical Location" attribute of the IIS server (that is, the server or virtual app, however you have it set up) to point to the project directory of the web project. Using the "External Host" option avoids this - see https://stackoverflow.com/a/48753054/1082063. (All other discussions of this issue that I have seen incorrectly say this cannot be controlled.)
VS then issues a request to the url <targetServer>/debugAttach.aspx, and the request shows as neither a "GET" nor a "POST", but a "DEBUG", whatever that is. Not sure what VS expects back from this before doing the specified Start Action
Presumably after VS gets some reply from its DEBUG request, it will attach to the process that resulted from this request. Not sure how it knows which process to attach to - perhaps the debugAttach.aspx returns process information?
VS finally executes whatever Start Action is specified in the section of that name on the Web tab of the project Properties.
I strongly suspect that the answer to (3) above is that one cannot get VisualStudio to attach any earlier than it does because it must use the information returned from the debugAttach.aspx request to know which process to attach to. However, putting the line System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Launch(); at the start of Application_Start will allow you to attach the debugger earlier when necessary. (In practice, once you get Application_Start correct, you seldom need to debug it.) See this: https://weblog.west-wind.com/posts/2011/Dec/15/Debugging-ApplicationStart-and-Module-Initialization-with-IIS-and-Visual-Studio for a very good article on the subject.
(4) was a result of quirks in our Visual Studio setup. The initial "hack" used to get around the WARNING in answer (2) just above, was to have a web site with a dummy "virtual path" and have the IISUrl element in Visual Studio point to this virtual path. Then VS could change the Physical path of this virtual path, and we didn't really care, because our Start Action was to start a proxy server for debugging .js in any case. The issue was that this resulted in two calls to Application_start, running on two separate threads: one for the main server and one for the virtual server. Because one of these was happening before the attach happened, we never knew it was happening and it was never caught in a break point. When our application_start became long (timewise - this is not a web server for public consumption...), the two executions of application_start became a nightmare.
The issue you're seeing in IIS is that VS is not launching w3wp.exe, but rather Attaching to Process. In order for VS to attach though the EXE has to be running first, and the time between starting up and attaching (if not already running) ends up being too late to catch the ASP.NET app initialization logic in Application_Start and Module initialization.
As mentioned in my old post there are several ways you can get this to work:
Restarting the application when the debugger is already attached
(by making a change in web.config to trigger an AppDomain reload)
Adding an explicit Debugger.Break() call in Application_Start
Use IIS Express to debug startup code
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.
I have a project that has, amongst other things, one web application (mvc) and one WPF application. For the part that matters, the WPF app connect to a WCF service hosted on the website.
What I want to achieve is that when I press Ctrl+F5 (start WITHOUT debugging), the build process kicks in (if needed, in other words, the default VS behavior), the WPF app launched, and if the webdev server is not launched, that it get launched too, but without opening any page on my browser (I'll manage that myself).
I managed to get that working as I want (configuration below), but every time I do a Ctrl+F5, I get a popup from VS that says
Choosing to wait for a request from another process without enabling
ASP.NET debugging results in nothing to debug.
I value the information, and that seems to match pretty much what I'm trying to accomplish anyway, but now, instead of having to close a useless tab in my browser, I have to close a modal dialog. Not a big improvement from my point of view.
So, how do I prevent this popup to show up ?
Additional information:
I don't want to start in debug mode (F5). If I need debug for the website, I'll do my usual (attaching to the webdev server).
I want the webdev server to be running all the time from the first CTRL+F5.
I don't want to publish it on IIS (even the express version)
The solution startup option is set on "Multi startup project" with the WPF app on "Start" and the website on "Start without debugging" (setting it on Start doesn't change anything, except that I also get the popup when debugging with F5 directly).
The website has its start action configured on "Don't open a page. Wait for a request from an external application". The ASP.NET checkbox in the Debuggers is checked.
Internet had not been a big help so far, so all my hopes lies on you SOers !
Edit
It seems that it was flagged as a bug, but I don't see any reference in what version it's supposed to be fixed...
Also, I discovered my question is a duplicate of this one.
I actually found another way : in the start actions, you can set it to "start external program" and reference a self quitting program. I used "C:\Windows\System32\PING.EXE". Not perfect, but also less annoying than the previous solutions.
Trying to print an ASP.NET Charting control behind the scenes in my web app. I think it is a permissions issue with the printer as everything is ok up until the point where my code calls:
chart.Printing.Print(false);
bool finished = false;
while (!finished)
{
finished = File.Exists(settings.GetValue("statusfile")); // file which indicates document was printed
System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(1000);
}
At this point the page just freezes (or continues to load endlessly - infinite loop!) Understandably this is happening because I am 100% relying on the document being printed. I do intend to add a timeout, however, at the moment I am just trying to figure out why exactly the document is never being set to the printer!
I have given the account (which the AppPool is running under) permissions to all the relevant folders and even the pdf printer itself...Still nothing.
Am I missing something? Is there any issues with printing on the server side via ASP.NET? I have encountered some issues doing this via WindowsServices in the past not sure if it is a similar problem with ASP.NET websites.
Update
As suggested I updated the AppPool to give myself (admin) permissions and it is the same issue. So by the looks of things the job is never being sent to the printer. I can't seem to figure out why though...
Probably should have mentioned this in my original post....but I am invoking the printer through a referenced DLL, this code is not being called directly from my application (incase it matters). Also this runs fine on my Development machine which is running Windows 7 IIS7.0 where as the server is running Windows 2003 server with IIS6.0.
Update 2
I removed the while loop and just left in the chart.Printing.Print(false) line and turns out the document IS being sent to the printer. So the issue must be with the settings file not getting written which is why the loop never breaks out!
To isolate if this is indeed a permissions issue, you could try running the application using the Visual Studio web development server, which will run under your credentials. Or if that's not an option, temporarily change the IIS app pool so it uses your credentials. If things still do not work, you may have another issue. I'm not sure which charting library you're using (is it the newish Microsoft one?), but maybe Print wants to show a printer dialog.
This may seem like a silly question, but we are having an issue debugging IIS in a shared test environment and I'm hoping that someone out there can give us an answer.
We have a Windows Server 2003 that is running IIS 6 and sharepoint 2007. We are debugging locally on the server with visual studio 2008.
When someone attaches the debugger and steps through the code, we find that all users are affected. In essence the web server stops handling all requests from all users.
Our question is whether this is a typical situation and is to be expected? Or is there some configuration that we can change that would allow the one user's session to be debugged but leave the other's unaffected.
Kev's on the right track. You need to make sure that the project you want to debug separate from the others is in its own application pool. This will isolate it to its own process and allow that process to be stopped/debugged without affecting the other applications which can remain in a different pool.
Setup
Start -> Run -> inetmgr
Right Click on Application Pools
Click New -> Application Pool
Name the new pool
Right Click on the application you want to isolate
Click Properties
Click on the Home Directory tab
In the application pool drop-down list select your new pool
Click OK
If there are any requests queued in the old process, they may take a few minutes to terminate before all requests are being diverted to the new process.
Debugging
To figure out which instance of w3wp.exe you need to attach the debugger to:
Start -> Run -> cmd
Type iisapp
You may be prompted to register CScript, if so click yes and run it again
The only gotcha you may still find is that if multiple applications are using the aspnet_state service you may run into blocking issues if you need to debug that process as well.
Links
MSDN
Developer.com
"When someone attaches the debugger
and steps through the code, we find
that all users are affected. In
essence the web server stops handling
all requests from all users."
This is normal, once you attach a debugger to a process such as inetinfo.exe or w3wp.exe and set a break point, every request/thread will be blocked until you allow the debugger to continue, until the next break-point.
I've never found a way around it. Is there some reason you can't debug on each developer's workstation?
Set up a parallel project on the server and try using that. You could use debug.mydomain.com and then just use that for testing. The only reason that I personally can think of to debug on your live servers is if there is a significant difference in the functioning of your app due to either hardware or software configuration.
Ideally you want to have a separate server/instance of your system in as similar an environment as possible so that you don't have to debug on your live machine. Also you might want to consider writing all errors to the event log or at least checking the log since asp.net usually get logged there. This way you can see where your errors are and use that to help you solve your problem in the development environment.
I believe in visual studio you can set the debugger to break only the process being debugged, and not all the processes. Depending on how your system is set up, YMMV with this.
It can't be changed AFAIK. But that's a normal practice to set up separate web-node or web-application for development/debugging purposes. If that's necessary to know exact values of some vars in certain situations you can always use debug logging.