Unable to Start Debugging in ASP.NET Applications.

Published 3 February 5 3:59 PM | William

Well, it's happened to my on a few machines so I figured I'd mention it. You're going along, your ASP.NET apps are working fine other than the bugs you've coded in them, and then you reboot one day and poof - as soon as you try to compile you get a “Unable to start Debugging” error message.  You can start via Debug-> Start Without Debugging but, well, Debuggers are underrated and life without them sucks.

There are many problems but one that you may not find when you google for it is this - if you've installed Whidbey recently or the 2.0 Framework, you're now probably running ASP.NET under the 2.0 Framework.  So if you go to your Administrative Panel -> Internet Information Services -> Web Sites and Right Click on Properties, you should see a tab titles ASP.NET  There you should also see a combobox with ASP.NET Version.  Switch that to the version your solution is supposed to be working with and your app should work now.

Note that you may get all sorts of other weird errors that make no sense.  If you've installed the 2.0 Framework recently, keep an eye out for this is your get some funny behavior in your ASP.NET apps.

Comments

# William said on February 4, 2005 10:23 AM:

This is quite a bothersome error .. I agree

# William said on September 21, 2005 12:48 AM:

Hi,

I've done what you say, but still cannot start debugger with VS 2005 beta 2. Very very weird. Unable to start debugging on the web server ... duplicate name exists on the network...

It is quiet dissapointing after days and days of research. No solution found in Google results.

???

# Netdawg said on February 15, 2006 9:43 AM:

I have searched for two days to find the solution to this problem. I've been through MSDN and several support pages from Microsoft. You solved my problem in one paragraph. Thank you!

Search

This Blog

Tags

Community

Archives

News

My other sites

Cool Stuff

Book Stuff

Security

ORM

Data Access

Funny Stuff

Compact Framework Stuff

Web Casts

My KnowledgeBase Articles

My MVP Profile

Design Patterns

Performance

Debugging

Remoting

My Fellow Authors

My Books

LINQ

Misc

Speech

Syndication

Email Notifications