Cannot remote debug IIS -- w3wp.exe is grayed out

Question

I am trying to debug an IIS Web Service using remote debugging. Because of our domain configuration (which we CANNOT change) I get an Access is denied when remote debugging via the Default option. The only solution I've found is to switch to Remote (Native only with no authentication) option in VS 2008.

The problem is that when I connect to the remote system the w3wp.exe is grayed out and oddly enough it's the only one in the list that is. Does this have to do with the Remote choice? Is there a way around this?

Answer 1

I have a similar problem with my setup. I am using Transport: Default and actually got two w3wp.exe processes running on the remote server. One is type of x86 and the other one (grayed out) is of type T-SQL,Managed and x86.

The ASP.NET Site I am trying to debug has debug allowed in IIS 6.0.

Edit:

Could be that there is some other process debugging (or just doing something) to the w3wp.exe. But what?

Answer 2

When you switch to "Native only with no authentication" mode, you're explicitly saying that you only want to debug "native" i.e. Win32 code, rather than .net code. There is, unfortunately as far as I'm aware, no way around this (I've tried! :().

Answer 3

I actually solved mine problem. The w3wp.exe was grayed out because I had installed Debug Diagnostics Tool on the server machine and set it up to follow IIS for crashed. Even though the program was not running it still had the "marked" the process for debugging (This might be totally wrong assumption). After removing the "markers" I could attach to the process.

So check out your services/programs if something is already attatched it self to the process. Does not solve the problem of not beeing able to debug managed code at all.