Little Known ASP.NET Debugging Quirk Solved

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I like to run Windows Server because IIS 6.0 allows me to add as many IP addresses as I want and configure completely separate web sites.

This is a big advantage with ASP.NET projects because now everything you do is relative to the real web site root (not the Virtual Directory root) and so you can expect exactly the same behavior in your app during development and debugging as you will when it is deployed to a real web site remotely.

The problem I've run into is that ASP.NET debugging doesn't always work. There are lots of reasons why ASP.NET debugging doesn't work, and there are lots of fixes, but this one is germane to the specific situation mentioned above:

If you have an ASP.NET app that is targeted to a specific web site root at a specific IP Address in IIS (not "all avalable" as is the default), you may need to modify both the .sln file and the .webinfo file to replace the site name with the actual IP address of the site. Then, ASP.NET debugging will work fine (provided you comply with the other 25 things you might still have wrong!).

Example:

.webinfo file:
<VisualStudioUNCWeb>
<Web URLPath = "http://192.168.0.110/MyWebSite.csproj" />
</VisualStudioUNCWeb>

.sln file:

Microsoft Visual Studio Solution File, Format Version 8.00
Project("{FAE04EC0-301F-11D3-BF4B-00C04F79EFBC}") = "MyWebSite", "http://192.168.0.110/MyWebSite.csproj", "{1EB1C062-1990-4483-AB4C-EA7854FE0E22}"
ProjectSection(ProjectDependencies) = postProject

Note that in both the above, the previous entries would have been "MyWebSite" and have been changed instead to the actual IP address the hosts file entry for it points to, or "192.168.0.110" in this case.

That does it!
Peter has been active on the C# and other MS newsgroups, has had samples at gotdotnet.com (now codegallery.com) that have been downloaded over 56,000 times, and has written numerous articles for eggheadcafe.com, for which he is a co-founder, and MSDNAA sites. He has also been a technical reviewer on books from Prentice Hall, Manning and other publishers. Peter was a Microsoft MVP for 10 years. Peter was born and raised in New York City, and after a stint as a jazz musician playing contrabass with the Robert Hunt Trio, migrated to sunny Florida, where he was hired as a rookie Financial Consultant at Merrill Lynch in Orlando, specializing in Corporate Services. It was at Merrill that Peter realized computers and technology were his forte. He spent his last few years at Merrill developing real – time computerized trading and and stock charting program using advanced technical analysis indicators, some of which are his own inventions. In 1997, he moved on to architect and serve as lead developer on a number of innovative web-based and middleware solutions for the healthcare and financial services industry.

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