Unable to attach to asp.net worker process as it is not in the process list

Question

I have been succesfully debugging my asp.net site using the Visual Studio 2008 virtual server however all of a sudden it has started timing out when connecting to the debugger with the following message:

"Unable to start debugging on the web server. The web server did not respond in a timely manner. This may be because another debugger is already attached to the web server."

When I tried manually attaching the debugger I noticed that the asp.net worker process is missing from the process list and is also not shown in task manager. Are these two things connected? If so any ideas how I solve them?

Answer 1

Try doing an iisreset /stop & iisreset /start on the command prompt; and if you are using IIS version >= 6.0, the worker process will be named w3wp.exe.

Answer 2

if you are using the development server that comes with VS2008, you will not see the worker process w3wp.exe, you will see the development server process WebDev.WebServer.EXE.