Visual Studio 2008 hangs when debugging classic ASP

Question

So part of the application I'm working on is still written in classic ASP. Visual Studio 2008 was working just fine to debug the classic ASP, and with the addition of a hotfix it wouldn't even crash when I stopped debugging. This was all working very well for a number of months.

Yesterday and today, several members of our group noticed that when we tried to debug classic ASP now, the IDE would hang immediately after trying to step into, or over a line of code.

The culprit as far as we can determine is a hotfix or update that was sent down with our corporation's SMS updater. The log files have been very unhelpful so far, and we've tried pretty much everything. This is not localized to Visual Studio 2008 either - we also tried going back to 2005 and the same symptoms appeared. Does anyone have any idea what's going on??

(Other things we've tried: Rolling back to a previous system restore point, reinstalling visual studio 2008 sp1, shutting down all add-ons, resetting environment defaults, uninstalling any update in Add/Remove programs that was installed in the last few days, using the SMS toolkit to root through the logs to find the culprit)

Answer 1

It seems you have no idea where the debugger is stuck. The best approach is to get a crash/memory dump of the system when this problem happens. Then the created memory dump can be analyzed.

A memory dump can be obtained from the windows debugger windbg with the command .dump or with the tool. See the attached link for the tool.

Then load the created dump file in windbg with the -z command switch and have a look at the corresponding call stacks.

Systemdump tool

Answer 2

Classic ASP debugging in 2009??? You Pantlicker!!!

Answer 3

There was a hotfix that worked for my group in order to fix this stuff.

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/KB967631

It hasn't been properly vetted, but I'm pretty sure this was the hotfix that fixed the issue for me.

From the comments for the hotfix:

This QFE fixes three complete separate issues in the VS2008 SP1 Debugger:
- Debugger can hang the IDE after setting a breakpoint when working with a large C++ project
- Breakpoints do not bind correctly when an MSIL file is built containing .line directives
- VS crashes when debugging a classic ASP web and debugging is stopped.