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

Living in the Future

Just thought I'd take a minute to point out the work Dave Winer has done to bring Flickr and Twitter together.

I've been following him on Twitter for a while and witnessed his early experimentation.

In a recent blog post, he described the experience of using this new service in a way that was so captivating that I just had to reproduce it here:

"So when I go out for a walk, and see a lovely tree with red flowers, I take a picture, route it to Flickr, my iPhone upstreams it, my agent notices it, posts a tweet, and then 80 or 100 of my followers (awful terminology, btw) click the link before I'm home. In real-time, their eyes and minds have taken the walk with me."

Dave goes on to describe the feeling one gets from being part of this experience as "Living in the Future."  And I have to admit that I felt something quite special, myself, when I first read the last sentence of the quoted passage above.

This is such a fantastic example of the wonderful connectedness being ushered in with the Web 2.0 movement.  I thank Dave for his work.

NBL is JavaScript 2

It's official!  NBL is JavaScript 2.  Just thought I'd pass that along.

P.S. If you don't read Steve Yegge religiously (as I do), then you'll probably have no idea what I'm talking about or why this is a big deal.