Classic ASP, IIS8 & VB6

Question

I was hoping to get some people's expertise as I'm currently outside my main domain. I'm currently working for a client that has an old system written in VB6 COM Objects. They use these to do basic Database interaction. These COM Objects are used in a Classic ASP website.

I've been tasked with getting the site up, running and in a build-able environment (Windows 8.1 is what they want to use).

I've been working through all the blockers associated with this and I believe I have it in a running state (as in I've configured IIS and been able to run the website, log in and click around and so far nothing has crashed).

I can make changes to the code in Visual Studio 6 Enterprise and those changes are working so I'm confident I've got that about 90% of the way there.

I've now got 2 problems both somewhat related:

Problem 1: Problem 1 is now debugging, both the ASP & the VB code.

I can put a break point in the VB code and 'Step-Into' it (to attach) and then run the site and the code that runs in the global.asa file gets run and hits that breakpoint no worries, can step through as I would expect.

The problem then comes when I go to 'login' to the system. I use the same user/password that works if I'm not 'attached' the system crashes with a "An unhandled exception ('Error in loading DLL') occurred in w3wp.exe [3284]." - If i try to load up a debugger from this Visual Studio 6 is not an option in the list. If I then detach and I can do everything as before.

Does anyone know what could be causing this? Or have another way to be able to debug/step through this?

Problem 2: They had previously been 'running' the website through Visual InterDev 6.0 - they could add breakpoints to the Classic ASP code and be able to step through then into the VB components.

The problem is that although I can install InterDev on my machine, I can't actually set it up. It appears to need FrontPage Server Extensions which although they can be 'installed' on IIS 8.5 they don't seem to be officially supported by Microsoft. So I've managed to install it without any issues but it doesn't seem to be configured in the same way that InterDev needs it to be able to setup a solution file/run from it.

My Question is this: Has anyone been able to configure FrontPage Server Extensions in a way that InterDev works?

OR is there any other tools I could use to 'run' a Classic ASP site that would allow me to debug it properly.

Let me know if you need any more information.

Thanks in Advance, Michael

Answer 1

I think you actually don´t need Interdev in order to debug the classic ASP code. Just create a blank solution in Visual Studio and add all the classic ASP files from the virtual directory (editor and debugging capabilities for classic ASP files are still supported, even in the latest version of Visual Studio).

I assume you run the web application in your local IIS... once you have the solution, open the script of interest, put some breakpoints and than attach the Visual Studio debugger to the web server´s worker process (which should be w3wp.exe). Maybe you need to manually select the Script code type (automatic code type detection might not work).