Here we go again…

Once again I was left with a system that doesn’t want to debug ASP.NET applications. This has happened over time a few times in the past on various machines.

I get the dreaded:

Error while trying to run project: Unable to start debugging on the Web Server. You do not have permissions to debug the server.

Make sure you are a member of: Debugger Users

Well, my account *IS*a f@&ing member of debugger users as well as Admin account.

Now I’ve been through this before, so the first thing I tried is exit my current Windows Login session and log back on under another Administrator account and try to compile and run the project. I've found that in most situations that works and it did this time as well.

This means that VS is working right but there's some configuration setting in the environment that's screwed. So what is it REALLY that VS.NET needs to debug this application?

After some more farting around (and another wasted hour) it turns out the real culprit is some Internet Explorer security setting. Remembering that I had moved localhost in and out of the local intranet zone for testing some authentication with apps locally a couple of days back on a hunch hunch I thought I make sure to check settings there.

Everything looked ok. Specifically you want to make sure that the  Include All Local (Intranet) sites checkbox is checked, but this was not my particular problem. Been there done that… without that setting VS.NET also will not debug.

But I figured it can’t hurt to rest the Intranet Zone’s security settings. And sure enough that did the trick. Now don’t ask me what setting actually caused the problem – I couldn’t tell you but for the local zone it’s reasonable to set security to Low or Medium and then reset any settings you really need more specifically.

 <RANT>

 I’ve ranted about the fact that VS.NET is so damn tightly integrated with the OS it’s a nightmare when something doesn’t work. This is another one of those instances where VS is using a seemingly unrelated system component and leaves no idea where the problem really could be to even start looking for solutions. While there's plenty fof information on this particular error message I haven't seen this mentioned as a problem before.

Total integration has its drawbacks. We can look even more of these nightmares with Team System where it’s not just a single machine that gets taken over but multiples over a network.

</RANT>