Debugging a Web Service Remotely

Leave it to your customers and co-workers to find a bug after you think you delivered a clean implementation. The good news is that the ASP .NET folks thought about this and have a solution—remote debugging. The first thing you will need to do is edit the web.config file on the Web server. Under the configurationsystem.web element is an element named compilation. Set the debug attribute to true to enable debugging, set it to false to disable debugging. The only thing left to do is to connect your development machine to the Web server. No extra files need to be installed to do this.

Look again at Figure 5.7. At the top of the Processes dialog is a combo box named Name. If the machine you need to connect to is not in the combo box, click the … button next to the Name combo box. This will bring up the Browse for Computer dialog box shown in Figure 5.9. Just browse to the Web server, select it, and click OK. Then, attach to the process the same way you would if you were debugging on your local machine. To do this, the user attaching to the process must be a member of the Debugger Users group on the remote machine. This works for cross domain relationships as well if the domain the server lives in can verify the identity of the debugger user from a different domain.