Visual Studio .NET 2003: Unsafe At Any Speed
In previous posts I’ve mentioned that I favor Macromedia Dreamweaver for ASP.NET development. I like to keep things positive, so I haven’t gone into a lot of detail about why I dislike Visual Studio .NET for Web development (although I have my problems with Dreamweaver as well). But suffice it to say I have always had an intense dislike for the VS.NET (and its excreable predecessor, Visual InterDev) for Web development. Particularly during weeks like this, when I have several fairly technical presentations to prepare for and the effing thing is not letting me run and debug the simplest Web application. On all of my computers (home, work, etc.) attempting to run a simple VS.NET Web app gives me the error message “Error while trying to run project: Unable to start debugging on the web server. You do not have permissions to debug the server. Verify that you are a member of the ‘Debugger Users’ group on the server.” But — hello! — I actually am a member of this group.
I think it is safe to say that this problem is not my fault. It is someone else’s fault. That someone else should fix their POS software so I can quit devoting my Father’s Day weekend to stressing over my demo.
Googling this error message reveals literally dozens of message board posts from people who are trying to debug within VS.NET and can’t. Unbelievable!
I am pretty sure that the unholy and unnecessary integration between VS.NET, FrontPage extensions, and Active Directory is at the root of all this. I hear that Visual Studio 2005 is going to resolve this in some fashion (my understanding is that VS.NET 2005 will let developers get and put files from the Web server using an FTP server or the network file system — just like Dreamweaver has done for years). I sure hope it gets better in that release; it can’t come soon enough for me, and it couldn’t suck any worse than it does today. Until then, I’m sticking with Dreamweaver or a text editor for Web stuff.
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Jeffrey,
what can i say: actually, you’re lucky you just can’t debug. i can’t even _run_ the darn things. requesting an aspx page on any of my dev machines throws exceptions on the server…
well, it least it works on the live server…
and yes, obviously its some kind of user rights error - but none that is fixable with any of the available documentation. :(
WM_
thomas woelfer
MkPark’s blog article is the best resource for diagnosing problems with the debugger. He has an extensive list of problem/remedy for various error messages in the debugger:
http://blogs.msdn.com/mkpark/articles/86872.aspx
One time I diabled the IE option to automatically send windows credentials to servers. When debugging stopped working I had no idea why. It is irritating that common options cannot be detected in order to add some details to a vague “cannot start debugging” message.
All I can say is get http://www.Sysinternals.com FileMon & RegMon, and start looking for permission problems. This has solved many problems like this where all others have failed.
Or print this out http://www.gotdotnet.com/team/csharp/learn/whitepapers/howtosolvedebuggerproblems.doc
a.s.
I was able to find that gotdotnet.com document via Google when I was fighting this over the weekend. The only thing it said that was applicable to the error message I got was “if you’re not a member of the Debugger Users group, add yourself.” Which I did. No luck. The MkPark piece had more information, but not much more about my problem
It’s super weird that I’ve experienced this problem on two different machines.
Anyway. Thanks for the FileMon tip, Andrew, I’ll take a crack at that.
I can understand your frustration, but these debugger problems are not that bad. It’s sort of like saying “I can’t find the ignition to my car, so the car sucks.” It’s not the car’s fault.
The best place to find answers to problems like this is not Google. It’s http://msdn.microsoft.com and http://support.microsoft.com . On many many occasions I’ve found answers on MSDN that were buried by a ton of crap on Google.
The car DOES suck if it says something like “Cannot start car because the doors are unlocked” and the doors are not unlocked.
> I am pretty sure that the unholy and unnecessary integration between VS.NET,
> FrontPage extensions, and Active Directory is at the root of all this.
Simple solution: Get rid of FrontPage and ActiveDirectory. The first is for idiots and the second is for corporate weenies.
Hey man, I feel your pain. I have screwed around with VS.Net ’till I wanted to puke although not with the debugger. ;-)
I promise you I have ran “aspnet_regiis -i” at least a billion times (or so it seems)!
Hey Jeffrey…long time no talk!
I feel your pain on this VS issue…Being forced into using VS.Net for a project I’m working on has me going insane. The whole html-mangling when switching from design to html view is enough to drive one crazy.
I can’t imagine how batty you’re going with this debugging problem. I was just thinking about switching to DreamweaverMX today for this project…Got any good references on migrating?
I’ve been developing with VS 2002, 2003, 2005 since the .NET beta. My advice is that amateurs shouldn’t try to deal with professional tools. Stick with something simple and easy to understand like Front Page.
For the amount of money we spend on Visual Studio, the damned thing should work. Professional tools should be solid and reliable.
For the money, I expect end to end installation of a complete development environment on my machine. Once I put in Visual Studio.NET DVD, I should not have to be digging some other CD or DVD to find a version of IIS to install or update, I should not have to be worrying about that stupid command line reg to install. I should be able to copy the DVDs to a network drive and install from there. And, when I use the product, it should work. I shouldn’t have weird glitches on the display during WinForms, I shouldn’t have big red xs, or have to build multiple times because Visual Studio doesn’t have a clean solution. I shouldn’t have to be deleting ncb files periodically, and for C++ I should have code complete for all the code that is referred to in my include files, not just some limited crap they contrived.
I’ve been a huge fan of Visual Studio since 2.0, and if I have to use it at work, I will, but for my own stuff, I’m going to bail and learn Eclipse and Gnu. If a professional developmental tool is DIY, then I may as well get one that follows the standards and works on multiple platforms.
Heh, I had a similar scenario happen with the install for June SQL 2005 beta killing my weekend.
I’m an MS Beta Tester, so I submitted an issue. The tech specialist apologized to me and my wife, so you can’t say MS is a heartless company. :)
Why isn’t there a ‘Visual Studio Update’ feature, or am I missing something. I have seen the above problem on many machines, so this has got to be something you could fix with a hotfix.
I hate visual studio 2003 for asp.net applications. Its making me go insane. Why does it reformat your html??? I like to have html structured. Why does it get attributes cocked up when you try and use that very sorry excuse for a designer?? Because it sucks.
I used to hate the early versions of dreamweaver because of similar bug bears, but they seemed to have fixed most of them in version 8. But to my horror, just as i was loving working with the trial version and being on the verge of ordering it…………IT HAS NO NATIVE SUPPORT FOR CODE BEHIND!!! AAAAAARGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!!!
Damn it. Looks like im stuck with Microshite Visual Shitudio 2003 :(((((
I went through the same trouble with “unable to start debugging” a few months back on .net 2005. Eventually, putting iwamuser and debugger users into root worked to fix it, and maybe some other finicky little nonsense that I can’t remember…we’ve been unable to duplicate this in a production environment, so we have one debug server just for asp.net…what a mess.
I have since set up a CentOS server running apache and do all my web apps in PHP…it’s more like a combo of classic asp and c++, but I find it very intuitive and it can do anything…and it’s way better documented. check out php.net and get their compiler… dreamweaver also supports it, so you don’t need any software. neat, ehe?
You must add visual studio to the debugger group or use an account for VS.net other than IWAM_machine. You may have to give VS.net explicit permissions
Make sure IWAM_”yourMachineName” has debugger permission and is a member of the debugger group.If Dreamweaver is debugging make sure VS.net is useing the same account or one with similar permissions. This should be IWAM_machine name I believe.
If you already made and deployed your app to IIS you cannot debug it unless you manually attach to the aspnet_wp.exe process and select common runtime files then choose your app from the list of deployed files/apps. Start at the debug menu and choose processes find aspnet_wp.exe then click attach. This will work if you already made and deployed the ap using Dreamweaver or Visual studio.
> can understand your frustration, but these
> debugger problems are not that bad. It’s
> sort of like saying “I can’t find the
> ignition to my car, so the car sucks.”
> It’s not the car’s fault.
It is if the car, during the course of the night, relocates the ignition switch under the car and you never to think to look there because who in their right mind mounts the ignition there!
dear my friends .
I have a problem with my one project that if a debugger is attached with one line then it take 2-3 min to go next line ..and if i do for the another project it works fine give me solution please
I just got an error message from Visual Studio 2005 that says
“Cannot rename ‘MySourceFile.cs’.No more internal file identifiers available.”
Yes, Visual Studio sucks. WTF is that error message suppose to mean? What does Microsoft expect a developer to do when he sees that error message? WTF is a “file identifier”? WTF is the difference between an internal and external one? And most important of all, WTF does it have to do with renaming a file?
God damn, I hate programming with Visual Studio! Give me Eclipse and Java any day.