Problems Debugging ASP.NET Apps in Vista

I was having an extremely annoying problem while debugging an ASP.NET app in Visual Studio 2005 under Vista.

It'd set a break point in my code and start debugging the app.  After stepping through a few lines of code and stopping to ponder a particular line, Visual Studio would suddenly exit out of debug mode, and I'd be unable to continue stepping through my code.

After googling around for a while, I finally found the answer to my problem in the ASP.NET forums.

 

Here's the solution:

- Launch the IIS7 manager
- Find the application pool your app is running under, right-click on it, and select "Advanced Settings..."

- Under "Process Model" find the setting called "Ping Maximum Response Time (seconds)".  Change the setting to something large.  I used "3600" (one hour).

- Click "OK"

 

That's it.  No more mysterious terminations of your debugging sessions.

Use Firefox to Debug ASP.NET Apps

Did you know that you can configure Visual Studio to use Firefox when debugging your ASP.NET apps? Here's how it's done.

- Under the Solution Explorer, right-click on any ASPX file and select "Browse With..."

- Click "Add..."

- Click "..."

- Find "firefox.exe" and click "Open"

- Click "OK"

- Make sure Firefox is selected under "Browsers" and click "Set as Default". Close the dialog.

Done! Now when you debug your ASP.NET apps, they'll launch in Firefox rather than Internet Explorer.

Blog Post of the Year?

"When I told one of our users, a business analyst, that using just one field for the name meant a huge amount of work for programmers, she actually asked me what our job was, if not to do the work that makes users productive. I’m very much afraid that things are out of hand. I tried to explain how our database schema works, and so on, but she impatiently insisted that it was our job to make things work."

I've been reading blogs like crazy this year, and I can say, with no exaggeration, that this may be the best post of the whole lot.

Reg FTW!

Multiline String Literals in C#

That little @ is even more magical than I thought.

C# still has a few surprises left for me.

RESTful Wankery

"An insider at MyTube tells us confidentially that they get up to 100 users before the system slows to a crawl, causing bored users to delete random files from their servers by requesting well-formed URLs like http://mytube.com/database/delete and http://mytube.com/debugger/start. 'It's just so rude', MyTube engineers were overheard saying in their Atlanta office. 'Some of our users are just plain wankers.'"

- Steve Yegge