I have a multi site Azure based web application. One site contains the web pages (with the view functionality driven through jQuery, Raphaël, and HTML) and a thin WCF service. The second site contains a more functional WCF service which in turn calls the data objects that call the database. We stopped development on the site a few years ago but it is still live for the few people who still enjoy using it.
Yesterday I had to fix an cross-site scripting vulnerability someone had reported on the site.
I was alarmed to find that I can no longer run the sites on my local machine under Visual Studio to test and debug any changes before deploying them to Azure.
Because of the interaction between the two WCF sites I had the local debugging set up as follows:
In the Internet Information Services Manager tool (InetMgr) I add additional websites with their physical path set to the location of the source code in the TFS local path on my machine.
I edit the host name in the site's binding to mimic the Azure location, i.e. the main site is projname.cloudapp.net:80 on Azure and projnamelocal.cloudapp.net:80 in my local IIS and the data WCF site is projname-wcf.cloudapp.net:8080 on Azure and projname-wcflocal.cloudapp.net:8080 in my local IIS. (N.B. The main site has a HTTPS binding too.)
I edit C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts to include the lines
127.0.0.1 projnamelocal.cloudapp.net
127.0.0.1 projname-wcflocal.cloudapp.net
In Visual Studio I edit the web properties for the main site's project so that it uses the local IIS and project URL http://projname.cloudapp.net/ and I have a switch (in the code to say whether to call the local WCF or the live Azure one.
In the past when the project was under active development this set-up worked fine for locally testing and debugging. Yesterday it failed, one one machine http://projnamelocal.cloudapp.net/ gave a 503 error on another a 404. (N.B. I can ping each URL from the command line so the hosts redirect is working.) Visual Studio complains that it is "unable to start debugging on the web server" and that it "could not start ASP.NET debugging".
I've tried all the suggestions and some:
Running without debugging
Running Visual Studio as administrator (I was already)
Re-registering ASP
Changing the app pool
Giving everyone full permissions to the code directory
Running as my own domain account that is an admin on the local machine
Changing IE to not auto-detect proxies
Adding the sites to IE's list of trusted sites
Turning off IE's protected mode
Restarting Visual Studio
Restarting the PC
Restarting the PC again
How should I set-up this style of running, testing, and debugging local sites work in IIS under Visual Studio?
Got it.
I had forgotten to go to Control Panel > Programs > Turn Windows features on or off > .Net Framework 4.5 Advanced Services > WCF Services > HTTP Activation
Now that I have that installed the local sites start
Related
I have a solution that contains multiple projects, two of which are web applications that have their own separate domains. I have this published successfully to my dev/production environment fine and now would like to mirror these settings across to my local machine for better testing.
I have configured the project to run under Local IIS and enter the required Url for both projects and hit debug, I'm then presented with the following error:
Unable to start debugging on the web server.
Invalid access to memory location.
Interestingly if I change my IIS configuration and remove the hostname and change the port to 81/82 (and reflect these changes in VS) then I can successfully start debugging my application.
This is more of an irritation than anything else as I can work without the custom hostnames and configure the rest of IIS perfectly, however this does get in the way of logging into both systems simultaneously.
I tried a number of recommended fixes such as:
Ensured app pool is running
Restarted Visual Studio
Restarted computer
Run VS as Administrator
I have just installed VS2012 and created a MVC project. I right clicked on project and selected property, I chose Web tab. I selected "Use Local IIS Web server" but the "Use IIS Express" checkbox is disabled.
I checked my C:\Program Files (x86)\IIS Express\ folder and IIS Express 8 is there.
Any particular reason?
If I fall back to use Visual Studio Development Server, I have 50% of the chance to see "Server Too Busy" message.
All you have to do is to activate IIS in your development machine:
Start -> Control Panel -> Enable or disable Windows features -> Internet Services
Then check mark in World Wide Web Services -> Common HTTP Features
And check mark in World Wide Web Services -> Application development Features
That's all you need.
Using Full IIS has some benefits. One is that it is always running, so you don't have to start your VStudio Project to unit test. Another is that you can create an actual site and configure IIS mirroring production, using the same Admin Tools, which makes it easier to support when deployed in an environment. And, I seem to recall that IISExpress had issues with Application Routing. On the flip side, I don't see an issue with using the Full IIS. Granted, IISExpress is much better than Cassini, but if there is no reason to not use Full IIS then I conitnue to advocate it's use.
I'm running Visual Studio 2010 and IIS 7.5
My site accesses a specified servers hardware for some statistical analysis.
When I debug my site in Visual Studio, I can access other servers hardware information with now issue. When I publish the site to IIS running as ASP.Net 4.0 appPool because the site is written under the 4.0 framework, the hardware retrieval fails. (note: when I run the site and analyze the local machine hardware, it works perfectly... the problem lies in analyzing another machine on the network.)
My question is, What is the difference in permissions a site is running under when debugging in Visual Studio in comparison to a published site in IIS 7.5?
Things I've tried...
Changing the app pool identity to every possible built in option, and my own domain profile, which is local admin on the machine I'm trying to retrieve hardware info about.
Changing the user that access the file directory of the website.
Changing app pools period. (The site has to run under .net 4.0, or else it barks out bad things).
I'm thinking I may need to install the site directly on the server that's being analyzed, but I find it odd that I can get all the data from other machine when I'm debugging. Any insight someone could bring would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!!
This answer is, in some cases, you have to add the appPool identity running the site to the "Performance Monitoring" group for the local machine in order to allow an ASP.NET site access the server's local hardware resources...
Do you do local development/debugging with the internal webserver or a local iis install? I'm currently running the internal VS2010 webserver but it's so slow it hurts. I can see the page rendering in front of me...
I prefer to use Windows Server 2008 as my development machine so that I can use IIS 7 as the web server and just set the default location of the website to a locally mapped DNS name. This especially helps when testing code that is dependent on domain URIs and other information of that nature.
One problem I have experienced is an intermittence in the ability of studio to bind the debugger to the IIS processes. (sometimes a reboot is required to get studio to bind if this happens)
sorry for possibly a very stupid question.
I have one of those Visual studio Web Sites ( ie not a web application) ,
is there any way I can automate the creation of the IIS Web Application that points to the web site within Visual Studio ( ie then when developers open the solution, the IIS site will be set up automagically?
Sorry, just not famiiar with the Web Site side of things
Thanks
AFAIK It's not someting Visual Studio will do out of the box. What you could do is create a batch file that creates the virtual directory then opens the solution. Store it in source control and your developers will be able to run it instead of opening the solution directly.
There are a few options for creating an IIS virtual directory automatically - see this and this.
Also - if you are using VS2005 or above you could change you application to use the development web server instead of IIS and then you won't need to mess around with virtual directories at all. Select 'Use default Web server' on the 'Start Options' section of the projects property pages.