vs2008 attach to process, can't see which process

Question

Hi,

In vs2003 (and vs2005(not sure about that)) when I attached to a process, before actually attaching I could see which process were running under w3wp (I have a couple of websites running locally) so I knew which exact .net application I was about to debug.

however in vs2008 the window doesn't show up anymore.. now I have to attach it, come to the conclusion it was the wrong process, stop debugging and attach it to the other process (if I haven't forgot teh processid :P )

Is there a way to "enable" that interesting window to see with .net apps are runnig in that specific w3wp process? or am i missing something obvious?

Answer 1

I don't think this was ever a feature in Visual Studio.

What you probably need is iisapp.vbs.

Answer 2

At the bottom of the Attach to Process dialog box you should see two checkboxes:

• Show processes from all users
• Show processes in all sessions

If you check either / both of these you should hopefully be able to see the processes you are after.

Answer 3

You can find out the PID - App Pool Id-combo by:

1. Log on the the remote server and start a command prompt session.
2. Run the following script: c:\windows\system32\iisapp.vbs. This script will list all the currently running w3wp.exe processes, listing their PID and application pool id. The application pool id is the only relation between the pid and your app.
3. Use the apprioriate PID to identify the correct w3wp.exe on the Attach to Process screen.

This will produce a listing like this:

W3WP.exe PID: 4784   AppPoolId: ReportServer
W3WP.exe PID: 6564   AppPoolId: TrunkTest
W3WP.exe PID: 220   AppPoolId: v650
W3WP.exe PID: 6420   AppPoolId: v650Test
W3WP.exe PID: 7220   AppPoolId: Trunk

From: Remote debugging with ASP.NET 2.0 - finding the process id (PID) of the worker process