Debugging a class in asp.net - c#

I have an asp.net web app, and I have added some related class projects to my solution file. When I run the web app, I want to break and step through the code in the class (when a class is referenced).
I don't get an error messages. The code in the class project just does not kick in.
I have searched and read this post Debugging a Class Library but no luck.
How do I get that to work?

Can you try to stop the ASP.NET process? I usually have this problem when the asp.net service is still running, and I compile (by asp.net service I mean the icon that appears near computer clock). Try to close that, recompile, then run.

Are you sure you have <compilation debug="true"/> set in your web.config file? Are the classes in the same assembly as the rest of the application?
edit: The only other thing I can suggest is stop IIS and/or all instances of the vs development server, clean the project, rebuild, and give it another shot. Also be sure there is only one web.config and you aren't running in release against Web.Release.config or something.

This sometimes happens. Check Debug>Modules to see if there is your dll loaded. It seems that VS debugger doesn't have .pdb file available. Clear Temporary ASP.NET Files in your .NET folder, Clean/Rebuild and try debug again.
Also do not forget to run VS as Administrator. Try to Attach to process instead of F5.

You can call in your code this function, and the debugger will pop-up
System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Launch();
alternative you can call the Debug.Fail("Stop me to see what next");

Related

unable to step into my local service that is in my solution

I know this has been asked before but I just cannot figure this out. I believe I have covered everything that has been brought up already but I'll cover those.
I am getting this message when I try to step into a service that is a project that is currently in my solution:
I have 3 projects in my solution:
SuburbanCustPortal <-- my website
SuburbanHub <-- my serice
WebsiteLogging <-- my logging project (no significance here)
I read that I should check the following items:
Make sure that debug is on. I have this in both of my project's web.config:
Make sure they are both using the same .net version. They are both on the .net framework 4.0.
Make sure Enable Just Your Code is unchecked:
The service is pointed to a local url:
I can pull up the service in my browser without error:
This is my settings for iis:
I have restarted visual studio, the computer and removed the service and added it back.
I cannot, for the life of me, figure this out. If I have missed anything I am willing to give it a shot.
It is very important that I get this resolved so I can get this project out this weekend so any help would be greatly appreciated.
IN RESPONSE TO Sanket Shah
I do not have the option w3wp.exe:
SOMETHING I FORGOT TO MENTION
I have set debug=true in both of my projects:
<compilation targetFramework="4.0" debug="true">
<assemblies>
<add assembly="System.Data.Entity, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089" />
</assemblies>
</compilation>
Also, I wanted to add that I have been able to step into my service before but since coming back to the project recently, I am not able too. I have a break point on the line that calls the service and when I try to F11 in to it, I get the above message.
IN RESPONSE TO Pawel
I have tried setting symbols the follow ways and neither allowed me to step in:
I have even tried to use the Microsoft symbols:
IN RESPONSE TO Pawel #2
ADDITION INFO
I just noticed this, I'm not sure if it is related:
ADDITIONAL INFO ABOUT DEBUG MODE
I have all projects set in debug mode:
Your solution/project/settings file(s) might be / seems like it is corrupted. If you create a new solution from scratch, adding new projects which mimic your current structure, you can try and see if debugging works properly.
If that works, gradually move the code over while keeping checking that debug keeps working.
I don't know why this doesn't work.
I have a work-around for you, which you verified in the comments: add System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Break() somewhere in your service after it starts. This should pop up some sort of exception window, with a list of Visual Studio instances open. Pick the one with your solution and click OK, and it should attach correctly to that location.
Annoying? Yes. In my experience with Visual Studio, it can be very finicky sometimes about debugging into Windows services. This is the only reliable way to do it that I know about.
In addition to other answers, you can do two things:
Close your solution, delete [solution-name].suo file, reopen solution. See if your problem still persists.
Open a command prompt as admin, cd %windir%\Microsoft.net\Framework\v4.0.30319, execute this aspnet_regiis.exe -i.
In solution, have you tried to set all assemblies (client and server) to start in debug mode rather than trying to attach it after launch ? (right click on solution in the top of Solution explorer, startup, multiple startup project, choose "start" for every assembly which is an entry point : server, client, etc).
Have you tried to run only the "server" part in debug mode (the one which is not debuggable) and call it for example with soap ui ?
You should try to see if you can run it directly and debug it without the "step in" from another process, or if it also fails to load in debugger even if started directly.
FYI, if you use IIS Express it's normal you don't see "w3wp.exe", which is for IIS. You may have a iisexpress.exe process, or in some cases aspnet_wp.exe.
Don't forget to check "show processes for all users" in Debug->Attach to process window if you choose to hook on existing process rather than doing that I was saying first.
Go to Properties of the solution select Multi statup project and select all projects with start, then debug the solution.

SharePoint HttpHandler debug issue - AdaptiveImages

We're working on making SharePoint responsive. Part of the deal is to have responsive images. I would very much like to start with an IHttpHandler ala https://github.com/davemcdermid/AdaptiveImages and customize for SharePoint.
What I've done: put this adaptive images code in a project and deploy it. Dll is confirmed in the gac.
Register the handler in the web.config. When that definitely wasn't working, I registered it in IIS. It is serving images but not allowing me to debug/step through at all. When I run debugger with VS2010, the error I get says "This breakpoint will not currently be hit. No symbols have been loaded."
I've tried attaching my debugger to alternate w3wp.exe processes.
Code is verbatim from the git referenced above. Breakpoint is right inside the ProcessRequest() method. Please let me know if further details will help. Any general thoughts on how I can get step into a httphandler with sharepoint in debugger?
Try deploying your solution first from visual studio then immediately running it in debug mode. I have had tons of problems with breakpoints not loading in SharePoint and this helps.
Another solution is to download and install WSP Builder. When you right click on your project inside VS, there will be a menu option to forcefully put the assembly into the GAC. This also helps load breakpoints. There is also an option to attach a process to w3p which helps with debugging too.
Good luck!
Sadly, my first StackOverflow question was one I ended up answering for myself. My handlers were not well registered. Doing it in IIS was actually problematic. My ultimate web.config registration ended up being:
<add name="AdaptiveImageHandlerGif" path="*.gif" verb="GET" type="AdaptiveImageHandler.AdaptiveImageHandler, AdaptiveImageHandler, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral,PublicKeyToken=2d12e1909d50e054" />
But thank you Meyer Denney for leading my brain down a different path. I needed a fresh perspective and after research wsp builder i decided to check one last time that my handlers were solid. And they weren't.

“No symbols loaded for the current document” ASP.NET C# Project

What to do now, this time??
I hate VS and this symbolic gibberish that never seem to have same solution (if it once was logic) twice. The screendump below says what it says.
As soon as I F5/Start the web project, the breakpoint going yellow. This ONLY affect the aspx.cs file that being changed. The other aspx.cs files can have breakpoints.
When I do rebuild/build all DLL and PDB files are created just fine. They have same compile time and are in same directory. Module-Windows i VS says the symbols are loaded perfectly. Well, yeah, try bite me!
I can tell, all symbolic is working just fine, until I was about doing changes inside those aspx.cs files (which was some time ago since last time). If I reset back the file, the breakpoint are working. If I try to make changes in another file, the problem appears there.
It simply appears like that the symbolic file generator don't understand changes maded in aspx.cs files..
Have you got compilation debug="true" set in web.config?
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/e8z01xdh(VS.80).aspx
This sometimes happens if you have changed the starting url in the Web -> Start Action -> Start URL to a different location. It could also be something in the Web -> Servers pane where something is set other as expected.
Also make sure the website in IIS (if you have configured IIS) is located to the right directory (where your project builds the output), otherwise it can't start debugging either.
I've found a good hint (see my comment higher in this thread).
The WEBAPP have, as seen above, an _dll path.
This _dll path are there because this project has dll files shared with other projects. This means save space and don't have copies of same files for several projects.
Though,
This raise problems beause the webapp still are output/copy files to it's own sub bin/ directory. And even worse, not ALL needed dlls, which make error when the running web project (due to missing xxWeb.dll, which copies to _dll bin).
Accepting the fact to use standard bin/ fixed the problem this time. Why? The answer on that will not be in this thread, sorry. Someone with an idea would course make a comment here. In general, this isn't a drawback because the webb project binaries should be at the end of reference tree..
Open Visual Studio Command Prompt
and Run devenv /resetsettings

EXE not running, accidental change in configuration?

I've been working on a simple project that uses some common .NET classes, isolated storage, some resources and no external libraries.
Somehow the EXE generated (either in debug or release mode) no longer runs (stops working as soon as it's opened) without giving any details or displaying any exceptions.
It runs normally in visual studio, and there's a .application in the same folder that when clicked starts in install process.
I'm not interested in installation files, I just want it to be the way it was: running an EXE (it's easier to get testers when all you have to do is running it).
I have previous versions of the program, and all of them run normally through the EXE's.
I don't recall changing anything regarding framework, deployment or build. I revised it and there's nothing changed apart from using new objects from the .NET framework.
--[Update]--
Just checked the event viewer. Event data "not available" and answer "not available".
This is a classic example of when a personal version control system would have helped. It would have automatically kept every version of your code including the one right before you made the change that messed up your exe.
Anyway to fix your issue comment out the majority of the code untill it atleast runs. Add a simple output statement just to make sure it is doing something. Then slowly add back in more code.
I suggest you to run your exe file in a consol (cmd.exe) to see if your application displays errors or exceptions in it.
Check the <YourAppName>.Exe.Config file.
Probably it is not well-formed Xml.
I'd start with removing the setup project from the solution, rebuilding then run it in debug mode.

Application_Start not firing?

I have an ASP.NET MVC (beta) application that I'm working on, and am having trouble figuring out if I'm doing something wrong, or if my Application_Start method in Global.asax.cs is in fact not firing when I try to debug the application.
I put a breakpoint on a line in my Application_Start method, and am expecting that when I attempt to debug the application that the breakpoint should get hit... but it never does. Not after I reset IIS, not after I reboot, not ever. Am I missing something? Why is this method never getting called?
Note : a nice easy alternative to using the inbuilt "Visual Studio Development Server" or IIS Express (e.g. because you are developing against IIS and have particular settings you need for proper functioning of your app) is to simply stay running run in IIS (I use the Custom Web Server + hosts file entry + IIS binding to same domain)
wait for debugging session to fire up ok
then just make a whitespace edit to the root web.config and save the
file
refresh your page (Ctrl + F5)
Your breakpoint should be hit nicely, and you can continue to debug in your natural IIS habitat. Great !
If this is in IIS, the app can get started before the debugger has attached. If so, I am not sure if you can thread sleep long enough to get attached.
In Visual Studio, you can attach the debugger to a process. You do this by clicking Debug >> Attach to process. Attach to the browser and then hit your application. To be safe, then restart IIS and hit the site. I am not 100% convinced this will solve the problem, but it will do much better than firing off a thread sleep in App_Start.
Another option is temporarily host in the built in web server until you finish debugging application start.
The following helps in any case (no matter if you're using IIS, Cassini or whatever):
Set your breakpoint in Application_Start
Start debugging (breakpoint most probably is not hit) -> a page is shown in the browser
Change web.config (e.g. enter a blank line) and save it
Reload the page in the browser -> breakpoint is hit!
Why does this work? When web.config is changed, the web server (IIS, Cassini, etc.) does a recycle, but in this case (for whatever reason), the process keeps the same, so you keep attached to it with the debugger (Visual Studio).
I'm too having problems with breakpoints in application_start with IIS a hosted app. A good workaround is using Debugger.Break(); in code instead of the VS breakpoint
I have just the same problem. I have made a lot of renaming in my solution. After it I got two not working web-applications and several another web-applications were all right. I got error that I have wrong routes. When I have tried to setup break point in Application_Start method, and then restart IIS, VS didn't break execution. With workable web-applications break was working. Then I have recalled that "clean solution" and "rebuild" doesn't delete assemblies that left after renaming. And that was solution! I have manually cleaned bin directories of my buggy-web-applications and then saw new error in Global.asax Inherits="" attribute was referenced old dll. I have changed it on new and break began to work. Suppose that, during renaming Global.asax wasn't updated, and IIS took old assembly (with wrong routes) to start application.
Had the same problem in a Project we had taken over after another vendor built it. The problem was that while there were a number of commands written by the previous vendor in Global.asax.cs, which might lead you to believe it was in use, it was actually being ignored entirely. Global.asax wasn't inheriting from it, and it's easy to never see this file if the .cs file is present - you have to right-click Global.asax and click View Markup to actually see it.
Global.asax:
<%# Application Language="C#" %>
Needed to be changed to:
<%# Application Codebehind="Global.asax.cs" Inherits="ProjectNamespace.MvcApplication" Language="C#" %>
Where ProjectNamespace is whatever the namespace is of your Global.asax.cs class (usually the name of your Project).
In our case the file contained a bunch of inline code, some of which was copy-pasted from the .cs file, some not. We just dumped the inline code over to the .cs file and gradually merged our changes back in.
Try switching the managed pipeline mode for the app pool to "Classic" instead of "Integrated". That solved the problem for me. Looking into the reason now...
(Props for this answer belong to Flores (see his comment on his own answer), I just wanted to provide this as a separate answer to draw more attention to it)
Make sure that your global.asax in not under a subdirectory. It has to be placed at root level into your project.
We had a similar problem, where global.asax.cs was being ignored.
It turns out that the site was upgraded from a precompiled .NET 2 web site to a .NET 4.0 site. On the server, the PrecompiledApp.config file had not been deleted from the root folder. After deleting it, and recycling the IIS app pool and touching web.config to restart the application, code in Global.asax.cs started working fine.
I had a problem once where the Global.asax and Global.asax.cs were not actually copied to IIS folder by the deployment scripts...
So it worked when debugging on the development server, but not under IIS.
A late entry...
To test whether or not the IIS Application gets started before the debugger has had enough time to attach just add this to the top or bottom of your GLOBAL.ASAX's Application_Start.
throw new ApplicationException("Yup, it fired");
I faced this problem when using a static page (e.g. index.html) as the start up page - Application-Start does not get called. I discovered that serving a static page does not actually start the application. Requesting an .aspx page does.
Make sure the namespaces in Global.asax and Global.asax.cs are same. If they are different it will not throw any error but will not hit the breakpoint also because it is not executing application_start at all.
When you say "debug", do you mean actually launching the application from Visual Studio's built-in webserver for debugging, or do you mean attaching to the process in IIS? If it's the former, you should hit Application_Start, but if it's the latter, it can be difficult to be on the process early enough to catch it.
Close Visual Studio and delete the bin and obj folders in your web project (or all projects in the solution).
Here are commands to delete these folders from all of your projects:
rm *\bin -r
rm *\obj -r
I had made some changes based on "Code Analysis on Build" from Visual Studio. Code Analysis suggested "CA1822 Mark members as static" for Application_Start() in Global.asax. I did that and ended up with this problem.
I suggest suppressing this Code Analysis message, and not alter the signature of methods/classes automatically created by platform used for bootstrapping the Application. The signature of the method Application_Start probably was non-static for a reason.
I reverted to this method-signature and Application_Start() was firing again:
protected void Application_Start()
{ ... }
I think the application start event only gets fired when the first request is made, are you hitting your website (i.e. making a request)?
I had this issue in a .net 4 web forms vs2010 project and tried everything mentioned on this page. Ended up removing and adding global.asax actually resolved the issue for me.
I hade the same problem, couldn't catch Application_Start.
And the reason was that it was not firing do to a missmatch in the markup file.
The markup file Global.asax was inheriting another class...
Did you check the Project settings?
I had this problem and I had the Start URL going to a different port than my server specific port.
It took me too long to figure out...
After trying as many of the other answers as were applicable in my situation and having no luck with any of them, I went into the properties for the Web project (the server-side project for a Silverlight app using RIA Services), clicked on the "Web" tab and changed the selected Server from "Local IIS" to "IIS Express". (Note I'm using VS2013.) This solved the problem. Application_Start executes under "IIS Express" but not under "Local IIS". Interesting...
I was trying to step through code in RegisterRoutes() called from Application start and not hitting my breakpoint. I determined Application_Start was not getting called. I had to make a change to make a superficial change to App_start/RouteConfig.cs and save it before Application_Start would get called. I guess these files get cached somewhere and are not called unless a change is made.
My same issue has been resolved by Adding reference of System.Web.Routing assembly in project
If you are using the System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Break(); workaround (which I think is just fine for temporary use) and it's "just not working" on your Windows 8 Machine. The reason is a bug in Visual Studio's "Just in time debugging".
The fix is as follows is to fix the key for the "Visual Studio Just-In-Time Debugger"
Open regedit and go to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AppID{E62A7A31-6025-408E-87F6-81AEB0DC9347}
for the ‘AppIDFlags’ registry value, set the flag to 0x8
More info here:
http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/770786/just-in-time-debugging-operation-attempted-is-not-supported
In my case, killing the built-in ASP.NET Development Server instance via the system tray resolved the issue.
Weird and crazy stuff... but debugging on a server machine and another user left IIS Express running on their session. I had to logoff that user to kill his running IIS Express processes. That seems to have fixed the problem!
Update
After spending more than 1 hour chasing what was causing the problem... here's the deal: I somewhat managed to type an s inside the <appSettings> section in Web.config. Visual Studio tried to warn me in the Error List window with a warning. I confess I rarely check warnings... should start checking it from now on. :D As soon as I removed the offending s the breakpoint got hit in Application_Start.
I had this problem when trying to initialize log4net. I decided to just make a static constructor for the Global.asax
static Global(){
//Do your initialization here statically
}
Problem mainly occurs when you try to relocate the Global.asax file to another solution directory. Relocate the Global.asax file again into the default location. It will work as expected.
None of the solutions described above worked for me.
However reinstalling the package
Microsoft.CodeDom.Providers.DotNetCompilerPlatform
using nuget gui is a (not too nice) walkaround

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