Classic ASP on IIS 7

Question

Hi,

I am having problems with my app running on IIS 7. The application is a mixture of classic ASP and ASP.NET MVC (don't ask how and why).

Anyway, the application is up and running except for some problems that I am experiencing. For example, I have a button on my page and when I click it, javascript is opening a popup which needs to contain .asp page. But that doesn't happen. I get the blank popup with my cursor on busy as it still loads. This is happening almost always to me in IE. In Firefox it is much better but sometimes the app jams there too.

If I close the opened, blank popup, and I want to move around the application, my buttons in menu (which are also .asp) doesn't load properly. For example, I have different buttons for different sections and when I move around they should change. When I restart the browser, only then everything works normal for some time, but the problem occurs again after a while.

I am very sure that it is not the problem in application itself, because it works properly on the machines of my colleagues without those problems. They have the same OS (Vista Professional) and we compared the settings in IIS and they match.

So I am very confused, and I really don't know how to solve the problem. I found a bunch of articles and blog posts about classic ASP and IIS7 but most of them are about enabling asp, which I already did.

So I am suspecting that something wrong with IIS, but I don't know what, tried to reinstall it, hoping for some improvement, but I had no luck.

If you need more details please ask.

Does anyone have any idea what should I try or do?

Answer 1

When debugging ASP.NET or ASP apart from the VS itself the most important tool you need is Fiddler (free tool from MS). This allows you to observe the http sessions the occur between your server and the client. This tool will give much greater visibility on what is actually happening underneath.

Next Step

So you now know that the problem is server side and the URL of the resource causing the problem. The next step is to debug the server side process by attaching to the w3wp.exe that is serving your site. If the resource specified by the URL is an ASP paged attach for script debugging or if its ASP.NET attach for Managed Code debugging. (Note for ASP debugging you will need to enable ASP server side debugging in the ASP settings in IIS manager).

You should place a break point on the first entry point of code for the resource. Now you can step through the code and discover where it is locking up.