IIS express and visual studio 2008 - IS IT ACTUALLY POSSIBLE????

Question

User-146799434 posted

has anybody ever anywhere in the world ever really debugged a website with vs2008 and IIS express as the web server? I have spent several hours looking for posts and actually posting on asp.net forums with no luck.
I got as far as invoking IIS express from my vs2008 with the start options and my vs2008 is attached to the iisexpress.exe
i have the express tray icon.

I used the parameters in this link to setup using IIS express with VS2008, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4682727/how-to-configure-visual-studio-2008-to-use-iis-express

but how to actually get a page to come up? so i can set breakpoints etc using the debugger????

I would use my xp pro default IIS 5.1 but there does seem any way to connect to it as you would if it was IIS 6, 7 etc.  Not being able to connect to the 5.1 started this journey to use IIS express instead.

Answer 1

User379720387 posted

If WebMatrix 1 came with VS2008, then yes I can confirm that I have debugged code with VS2008.

Currently I am on WebMatrix 3, on a Win 7 machine with VS 2012 Express for Web.

From WebMatrix I can open VS, and debug my code.

There are no settings to configure.

Answer 2

User-146799434 posted

WebMatrix did not come with my vs2008 package that I ever saw. I am running xp pro, it came with IIS 5.1 as the freebie IIS which evidently is impossible to change to a more recent version. Using IIS express was suggested as an alternative to IIS 5.1 since that seems to be impossible to work with using vs2008. 

so the question remains, for xp pro, vs2008, has anyone ever in the history of the world been able to vs2008 debug a web application running under IIS express? if so please share what you did besides the setup here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4326530/how-do-i-configure-iis-express-to-run-with-vs2008

Answer 3

User-801004448 posted

I thought Visual Studio uses its own IIS server to debug website.

I don't use Windows XP. I use Windows 7 but don't have IIS installed. I can still run website from Visual studio to debug.

Answer 4

User-146799434 posted

your right, vs has its own 'website' for website projects. however, my website project eventually runs on a large commercial website with master pages that access css, java script, image, etc folders on the production website. I need to mimick the production website and it means I have to keep bringing the extra folders in my project, so that all the objects, files etc can get resolved. If I set that up one time and then run the project on my local IIS or IIS express it would be much easier.

Answer 5

User-801004448 posted

It would be tough to mimick production environment when you run Windows XP on your computer.

You can try installing IIS 7.5 express on your computer for testing website

http://www.microsoft.com/en-au/download/details.aspx?id=1038

IIS 7.5 is used on Windows 2008 server. If your production server uses Windows 2012, it is IIS 8.0.

Answer 6

User-146799434 posted

well I've been trying to get that working, that is what I posted about, how to actually get IIS express working/debugging pages that are invoked in iis express.  been there, doing that but it is not responding, in a previous post I explained having tried this:

I used the parameters in this link to setup using IIS express with VS2008, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4682727/how-to-configure-visual-studio-2008-to-use-iis-express, 

Answer 7

User-782232518 posted

Like answered here, http://forums.asp.net/p/1919698/5974778.aspx?p=True&t=635799758553942015 there is no VS builtin support to launch debug page automatically. You have to manually launch a web browser to access the site.