What Was I Thinking?

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately debugging through some web-hosted applications.  Some of these applications are hosted by Visual Studio’s own internal web server (Cassini), and others are hosted by my local instance of IIS.

Web projects hosted locally get automatic attached to the VS debugger when you press F5.  Projects hosted under IIS do not.  In order to debug IIS hosted projects, you must attach the Visual Studio debugger to the IIS worker process (aspnet_wp.exe or w3wp.exe) manually. 

Traditionally, you attach by selecting Attach To Process from the Debug menu, scrolling the list of processes until you find the worker process and then clicking “Attach”.

Thanks to this handy macro I found by HologramX at snipplr.com, I’m able to attach with a single keystroke:

To add this macro to your environment,  Tools > Macro IDE > Add new item to MyMacros > Select Module, Name 'AttachToWebServer' > Copy/paste code.

Imports System
Imports EnvDTE80
Imports System.Diagnostics

Public Module AttachToWebServer

    Public Sub AttachToWebServer()

        Dim AspNetWp As String = "aspnet_wp.exe"
        Dim W3WP As String = "w3wp.exe"

        If Not (AttachToProcess(AspNetWp)) Then
            If Not AttachToProcess(W3WP) Then
                System.Windows.Forms.MessageBox.Show(String.Format("Process {0} or {1} Cannot Be Found", AspNetWp, W3WP), "Attach To Web Server Macro")
            End If
        End If

    End Sub

    Public Function AttachToProcess(ByVal ProcessName As String) As Boolean

        Dim Processes As EnvDTE.Processes = DTE.Debugger.LocalProcesses
        Dim Process As EnvDTE.Process
        Dim ProcessFound As Boolean = False

        For Each Process In Processes
            If (Process.Name.Substring(Process.Name.LastIndexOf("\") + 1) = ProcessName) Then
                Process.Attach()
                ProcessFound = True
            End If
        Next

        AttachToProcess = ProcessFound

    End Function

End Module

To set as a keyboard shortcut go to Tools > Options > Keyboard, and search for the name of the macro (AttachToWebServer) and then assign a keyboard shortcut.

IIS-Attached Debugging is now one keystroke away.