Other way to Debug ASP Classic (VBScript) aside from Attaching Process using Visual Studio

Question

Is there any other means to debug an ASP Classic application using Visual Studio?

Right now, I have a classic ASP application and I use the IIS 5 of WinXP. I debug the ASP application right now by attaching the DLLHOST.EXE from (Debug > Attach Process) in Visual Studio 2005.

This works fine except sometimes when debugging like this the line where I am debugging becomes misaligned. Also, It is becoming very tiresome to repeat the Tools Attach Process process over and over again.

I have an old Visual Studio 6.0 interdev, can it do the F5 style seamless debugging I can do in ASP .NET?

Actually what annoys me on debugging with Visual Studio 2005 is I need to attach the dllhost.exe each time I debug.

Answer 1

I find it tedious as well to the point where I avoid doing it somewhat. However, try using only your keyboard to open the website and attach to the process, for me this makes it much less tedious.

If I remember correctly and for my environment... Alt+F E (open website) Enter Ctrl+Alt+P (Attach to process) D (to select DLL host) Enter Enter

Answer 2

You can make a macro in VS2005 to do this.

http://blogs.msdn.com/jimgries/archive/2005/11/30/498264.aspx

Contains an example of attaching to the Calc process.

Sub AttachToCalc()
       Try

              Dim dbg2 As EnvDTE80.Debugger2 = DTE.Debugger
              Dim trans As EnvDTE80.Transport = dbg2.Transports.Item("Default")
              Dim dbgeng(1) As EnvDTE80.Engine

              dbgeng(0) = trans.Engines.Item("Native")

              Dim proc2 As EnvDTE80.Process2 = dbg2.GetProcesses(trans, "JIMSMACHINE").Item("calc.exe")

              proc2.Attach2(dbgeng)

       Catch ex As System.Exception
              MsgBox(ex.Message)
       End Try

End Sub

Answer 3

The only way to debug classic ASP in VS2005 and VS2008 is by attaching to the ASP worker process. However you can automate that with a macro so the whole ordeal is reduced to pressing a key combo. Here is an article with full working code on how to do that. It should work on any version of IIS.

http://blogs.msdn.com/greggm/archive/2006/03/15/552108.aspx