How to use W3WP.exe effectively to debug SharePoint applications?

Question

Can anyone tell me how to effectively use w3wp.exe to debug sharepoint applications?

Answer 1

If you are are running SharePoint on your development machine where you have Visual Studio installed - you can attach the debugger to the w3wp process, then breakpoints in your code will be hit when you 'touch' them from the web interface.

How to connect the debugger - good description in the MSDN article here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff650703.aspx#Performing_Manual_Debugging

Answer 2

If you want to debug your bespoke application that sits within sharepoint via Visual studio i would recommend that you download WSP builder it has dubugging options within it. I'm sure this does the same thing as the post above but it also has sharepoint related things within it that may be of use.