Why does Visual Studio launch multiple WebDevs when I debug?

Question

I have a Visual Studio 2008 solution with several projects in it - some of which are web applications / sites.

Whenever I go "Debug > Start new instance" for a specific web application and VS launches the ASP.net Development Server (WebDev.WebServer.EXE) for that application, VS also launches 3 additional such processes - one for each of 3 other web applications I have in the solution.

How can I tell Visual Studio to only launch WebDev for the one project I'm debugging? I've looked both in the project configurations and in the solution configuration and could not find the relevant setting...

Answer 1

I think it runs one for each Port -- you can try turning setting them to have the same port - click on the project and look at the properties pane (you have to turn off the the automatic port generation and then set the port#)

Answer 2

Suggestion - don't use the internal WebDev, use IIS instead. Also reduces the clutter in the systray. ;)

Answer 3

See the accepted answer here:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16363/how-do-you-configure-vs2008-to-only-open-one-webserver-in-a-solution-with-multi#16390

Answer 4

I tried the above solution but it did not worked. My solution was a vs2005, what I found to solve the project was to make the property window of VS 2008 visible. Then click on the web projects and then set the "Always start when debugging" property to false and this should take care of it :(

Answer 5

In Visual Studio 2008, there is an entry on the Properties page for the project called "Always Start When Debugging".

Note you have to get to this by selecting the project and going to the Properties pane (or right-clicking Properties). This option is not present when you double-click the project and open it in the main editing pane.

VS by default sets this value to on for all your web projects. Turning it off will solve this problem.

[editorial]This is fairly annoying and I wish the default were false![/editorial]