ASP.NET Development server crash

Question

I'm getting a crash while trying to debug a asp .net application via webdev from Visual Studio 2008. Normally, the usual way of troubleshooting this issue is to narrow down the code change that would lead to the crash. This is usually time consuming. Fortunately, this only happens once in a blue moon.

I'm wondering if there is a faster way of troubleshooting these kind of crashes. Failing that, what are the usual causes that would cause webdev to crash?

Update:

• My current case seems to be caused by a stack overflow. :)

Answer 1

Are you able to get an exception message being thrown? If not, I'd recommend downloading and injecting ELMAH (a nice debugging tool) into your app to see what is going on at crash time.

Answer 2

You might be able to use ADPlus to find out why the VS web server is falling over:

How to use ADPlus to troubleshoot "hangs" and "crashes" (MS KB286350)

Tess Ferrandez's site has loads of good stuff about using ADPlus and WinDBG for these kinds of gnarly problems:

If broken it is, fix it you should (Tess Ferrandez, ASP.NET Escalation Engineer (Microsoft))