Setting It All Up

There really isn’t a whole lot to mention here. It is extremely simple to use the Visual Studio .NET IDE for debugging ASP.NET pages. In most cases, it will be a plug-and-play affair. The default debug build of any ASP.NET project will have everything set up for you to begin. However, even though that probably will be the case, we will discuss what is absolutely required for the debugging to work, just in case something goes wrong.

Take a look at the web.config file contained in your project. This is an XML file that contains specific configuration information for your ASP.NET project. One line in this file will look similar to the following:

<compilation defaultLanguage="vb" debug=="true" //> 

The defaultLanguage parameter will be based on the default language of your ASP.NET project. But what we are concerned about here is the debug parameter. If you are running in a debugging environment and want to be able to access the spiffy features of the Visual Studio .NET IDE, this debug parameter must be set to true, as it is in the previous line. If it is set to false, none of the features will work. This is what you want for a release build of your project.