step through debugging for classic asp with VS2008

Question

Hello,

I am coming from the django world to maintain a fairly complicated classic asp site. Unfortunately the site is riddled with uncommented, copy/pasted, spaghetti code spread out over several hundred files hidden away in a few dozen directories.

To be curt, it's a bit of a nightmare ;)

Anyway, I am most familiar with eclipse, and I was wondering if Visual Studio 2008 can do the kind of debugging capabilities you would expect from such a prolific IDE. Can I step through this asp application line by line, set break points, and view the contents of variables on the fly? if so how?

If I need to add everything to a project, what is the best way to bring it all in? I havn't used vs in a while, but last I checked it liked to add a lot of files to your web server. Is that still an issue?

thanks so much, my sanity may depend on it lol

edit: I should note that I'm not married to using vs2008, if you know of other debugging tools that you think are better, let me know! I'll use anything as long as there is documentation :)

Answer 1

try to find some input here, seems promising

Answer 2

1. Turn on server side debugging in IIS7

2. The quickest way to drop into the debugger is to write the word

   Stop

somewhere in your asp file. As soon as you load the page and that is hit, the debugger will popup.

Answer 3

I could make it work...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/958968/has-anybody-been-able-to-debug-asp-classic-code-with-visual-studio-2005-or-later

following these instructions...

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/debug/DebugVBScriptVS2008.aspx

http://codepagoda.com/2009/04/30/debugging-classic-asp-with-visual-studio-2008-sp1-and-35-framework/

but after a couple of days it just broke down...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1060780/i-can-no-longer-debug-classic-asp-code-with-visual-studio-2008

I hope you'll have more luck than me