I have seen this for a long time, and finally decided to put the question up here. I have some applications that I need to maintain that were written in Delphi 2007 for .NET (ASP.NET 2.0). Normally, the first time I run the application (using IIS) I get the classic "Unable to start debugging on the web server. Unable to attach to ASP.NET worker process" message. I simply press F9 (run) again, and it runs. Sometimes I have to try running several times before it will actually run.
I am running Windows 7 64-bit (and have seen the same effect on Vista 64-bit). I do have IIS configured for ASP.NET, and I do have the following code in my Web.config file.
<system.webServer>
<modules>
<add name="DbgConnect" type="Borland.DbkAsp.DbkConnModule,Borland.dbkasp,Version=10.5.0.0,
Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b0524c541232aae7" preCondition="managedHandler" />
</modules>
<validation validateIntegratedModeConfiguration="false" />
</system.webServer>
The point is that I eventually can run the application in the debugger, sometimes even on the first try. Many times when I get the failure it happens about 15 seconds or so after I press Run, sometimes even after I've hit a page or two (or three) of the Web app. And, yes, when Delphi gets into this mode, I can simply run without debugging, and all is fine (unless I really want to debug). And, I can just keep on trying to run in the debugger and eventually it will just work.
It appears that Delphi's .NET debugger is somehow getting the idea that the application cannot run, and then gives up and stops the process (which as I've mentioned is sometimes clearly running).
I know of other developers who have also seen this behavior. My question is, does anyone know how to stop this annoying behavior?
I don't remember the exact error message, but I believe I've seen something at least similar to this in the past. All I did to fix it was run a "Repair" on the .NET 2.0 Framework (through Control Panel --> Add/Remove Programs). Then maybe restart your computer after that...
If you have this problem, you're going to continue to have this problem. However, here is a workaround.
Begin by running your project without debugging, and then attach to it once it is working. To do this, select Run | Run Without Debugging, or press Ctrl-Shift-F9.
Once your application is up and running, and you want to have the services of the debugger available, select Run | Attach to Process. From the Attach to Process dialog box, set the Debugger dropdown to CodeGear .NET Debugger. IIS will now appear in the Running Processes listbox. On my machine, it appears as w3wp.exe. Uncheck the Pause After Attach checkbox, and then click Attach. (After using the Attach to Process dialog box the first time, it will default to the .NET debugger and Pause after attach will not be checked.)
You are now running with the debugger enabled. If you hit a breakpoint, or encounter an exception, or select Run | Program Pause, the debugger will be loaded. If you want to disable the debugger without closing the application, select Run | Detach From Program.
Apparently, since the application is already running, whatever was giving up and giving the false error message is not involved.
On the plus size, there is a nice side effect of using this approach to debugging a Delphi for .NET application. Once you are runninng, and find a problem, you can pop into the debugger and see what's going on inside. If you find a problem to fix, detach from the proces, fix the problem, and re-compile. You can leave your application running in IIS.
Once the project has been re-compiled, the next page you hit in the application using IIS will cause the updated program to load. If you need the debugger again, simply attach to the IIS process. In other words, you an debug, fix, recompile, debug, fix, recompile,... without having to ever close the application in your browser.
Related
It stops responding after a few seconds of being idle. I have to restart it every time this happens.
I have tried putting startMode="AlwaysRunning" into my applicationHost config, but nothing changed.
The output of the console is just a bunch of
The thread X has exited with code 0 (0x0).
I don't think this is related to idleTimeOut either, because the website completely stops responding; it just hangs.
applicationHost if anyone is interested (too large to post here):
http://pastebin.com/quVMXPHP
Let me know if you need further information.
Are you sure it's from being idle? By default, every time you stop debugging, IIS Express unloads the website, and quits entirely if there's no other websites running. You can disable this by unchecking Enable Edit and Continue in the project properties under the "Web" tab.
If it happens more randomly, then IIS Express may actually be crashing. Check in the notification area of the taskbar for IIS Express, make sure it's there, and (by right-clicking) ensure your web project is still loaded (in the list). If it's actually crashing, you most likely have a memory leak, infinite loop, or something similar going on somewhere in your application that's overloading the process. There's no much we can do to help you with that, without being able to examine your entire codebase. You'll just have to trace and profile until you find it.
I am running/debugging an asp.net mvc3 application from within Visual Studio 2010.
Anything static in nature is not called when I re-run the app from within Visual Studio.
(or even something simple like Application_Start())
Each time I want to run the webapp 'properly' I need to kill WebDev.WebServer40.EXE in the task manager before anything static is called again.
q1) Is this normal, and if Yes, why?
q2) If no, then I would expect the ASP.NET Development Server to be restarted each time I restart a debugging session. How can I turn this on?
UPDATE:
Recompiling sometimes causes Application_Start to be called, not always.
I've resorted to calling a batch file in the prebuild, eg
kill_WebServer40.bat
which contains
taskkill /F /IM WebDev.WebServer40.EXE
exit 0
If you embed those two commands directly into the pre-build textarea your compilation will fail if the WebServer isnt running already. This linked helped fix that.
Surprised this wasn't discussed more/previously - when developing an app, as if you have any static data/caches and you want to run the application 'clean' you would run into this issue.
Yes it's normal. It will restart if you touch the web.config or recompile. The development server continues to run the application in the background after you stop debugging.
You can stop the development server in the task tray by right clicking on the icon and choosing stop.
There isn't a way to force a application restart every time you hit debug. This would only be needed for the edge case where you are debugging application start up. Just hit rebuild before debugging and it will have the desired affect.
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.
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.
I am trying to debug some code in my ASP.NET web app.
I set a breakpoint in one of the page events of the page's codebehind, and this once came up with a special icon in place of the red breakpoint saying symbols have not been loaded and the breakpoint will not be hit.
This error has not repeated itself but why can't I hit the breakpoint?
Also, when I press stop, I get a popup in VS stating:
Stop Debugging In Progres...
Debugging is being stopped but is not yet complete. You can force debugging to stop completely, but any processes attached may terminate.
This window will automatically close when debugging has completely stopped.
Completely stop
I also don't get the website appear in my browser either when starting to debug. :(
To make things worse, I have a line of code like this in my page's codebehind:
RssFeedSites = opml.Parse(filestream);
I am putting the problematic breakpoint on this line. But I have a programatic breakpoint in the Parse() method of opml, but this does not get hit, either.
Thanks
Could you check if the dll is perhaps in the GAC? If it is it is probably an older version and the GAC has priority over local dll's. So if the dll is in the GAC visual studio is using that (older) version instead of the newly built one.
the debugging host could not find the correct pdb's to match your executable or the debugging host is failing.
Check your build, are your PDB's all up to date and in the correct directory to be found ?
Check the debugging host process if its having problem. If your using visual studio hosting process, then has the vshost.exe process somehow terminated prematurely ? If your remote debugging, check the remote debugger. Check your web server as well. If the debugging host process fails to respond, visual studio will be stuck when trying to debug.
I don't recall the specific reason for the message when I have seen it, but I always ignore it, because the symbols get loaded when the page is executed and it always hits the breakpoint assuming it's in the process flow of the page.
If you can't hit ANY debug points and you are running from local IIS, you will need to attach to the working process(w3wp.exe). Tools->Attach to Process.