IIS not giving line numbers in stack trace even though pdb present

Question

Web config has debug=true and the project is a debug build and the pdb files are present in the bin directory, but I do not get line numbers in my stacktrace when an exception is thrown.

Works fine with local IIS/Cassini but not on our test IIS servers. Is there some obvious setting that I might be missing?

Answer 1

Check the MAchine.Config file

In ASP.NET 2.0 there is a switch that can be turned on in machine.config that turns off all debug=true, so in 2.0 applications you can do this directly without worrying about finding out which applications do and don’t have it.

<system.web>

      <deployment retail=”true”/>

</system.web>

Sources from http://blogs.msdn.com/tess/archive/2006/04/13/575364.aspx

Answer 2

Maybe this could help, until you can find a better solution:

• Enable Stack Trace Line Numbers in ASP.NET and SharePoint and GAC-ed Assemblies
• Display source file and line number when in production server

Answer 3

It turns out using impersonation with the web.config:

<identity impersonate="true" />

causes the loss of the line numbers in the stacktrace. I took the entry out and my line numbers returned, put it back and after a few hours (Kerberos ticket refreshing?) the line numbers disappeared again.

Not sure why impersonation affects the stack trace but it does - would be happy to have someone confirm / explain this...