Setting up IIS7.5 for local ASP.Net Development

Question

Are there any particular settings one should optimally enable/disable/tweak when doing ASP.Net MVC development on local test machine Windows 7 using IIS 7.5 and moving in and out the debugger & recompiling refrequnetly (integration/troubleshooting stage now before TDD fantactics throw stones - although admittedly I could have more under test), I work with 64 bit edition but figure this probably applicable at both x86/x64?

I'll start with one: Ping Period (seconds) - increase from 90 to 3000 (or something somewhat higher) so you can if unfortunately need to a good bit of time whilst debugging or disable ping on local test machine.

Credit: http://blogs.msdn.com/johan/archive/2007/09/12/my-web-application-times-out-when-debugging-in-iis7.aspx

However I see over stuff such as: Disable Overlapped Recycle & Recycling settings etc.. that I wonder if could increase performance or make debugging less friction

Question prompted by the annoyance that I've ran across a few recent debugging issues (not apparent in production) including a random, and tempormental error "An assembly with the same simple name blah-blah-lah-assembly-definiton has already been imported . Try removing one of the references or sign them to enable side-by-side." (iisreset resovles) and generally slow debugging attaching. The points and answers to this question need not help with the above (I believe it may be related to spark view engine as that where the stacktrace ends) but figure it worth mentioning incase someone has a direct suggestion *

Answer 1

Embarcadero guys just published a fresh article on similar topic for Delphi Prism (aka Delphi for .NET), so why not take a look on their suggestions?

http://edn.embarcadero.com/article/40108

Answer 2

From the experience i have working with asp.net mvc, i can tell that there are no special settings for IIS 7 or IIS 7.5 for working on asp.net mvc projects. It works fine in the default form, you just need to create a new website and point it to the folder that has the files for you application.

For debugger if you ask, you can simply put a breakpoint in the code and hit that breakpoint when you run the application from visual studio. But by default the application will use the development web server that fires up when you run a web application from visual studio. If you want to the application to run using the IIS installed on your system you will have to change the project settings. See here for a screen shot of how to do so

http://blogs.bootcampedu.com/blog/post/Debugging-aspnet-mvc-application-using-IIS.aspx

Additionally you can also use System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Break(); for putting a break point in the code.

Answer 3

If you only want to debug your application, I recommend to use the built-in development server of Visual Studio. If you debugged the most of it or want to do that on IIS, I recommend you the Ctrl+Alt+P shortcut, which enables you to attach a debugger. Select w3wp.exe and you can debug with IIS.

Answer 4

quick tip: if you're experiencing slow response times (~1-1.5 sec) from browsers other than internet explorer (eg: firefox, chrome, safari) while running your mvc/ other web app on your local machine using win7/vista, it is due to dns resolution with ipv6.

firefox solution: disable ipv6 in about:config (boolean cfg 'network.dns.disableIPv6')

machine wide soft solution: uncomment the good old localhost address in the hosts file (%WINDIR%\System32\drivers\etc\hosts):

# localhost name resolution is handled within DNS itself.
    127.0.0.1       localhost
#   ::1             localhost

machine wide hard solution: disable ipv6 completely

credit goes to this blogpost: http://weblogs.asp.net/dwahlin/archive/2007/06/17/fixing-firefox-slowness-with-localhost-on-vista.aspx