ASP.NET Debugging : IIS7

CannonPI teaser video

Tom — Thu, 07 May 2009 20:58:01 GMT

There is a new video up on youtube that is the beginning of many more videos. You should check it out and look for for more coming soon.

Also, see if you recognize any of the people in this, feel free to post here who you think they are.

The PDC this year…

Tom — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 13:00:00 GMT

Not sure how many people are planning on attending the PDC (Professional Developers Conference) this year, but it is going to be a fantastic conference.

We announced some huge announcements on the PDC web site. http://www.microsoftpdc.com/

We have a major lineup of executive keynote speakers representing most of the core Microsoft businesses.
We’ll have 20+ Windows 7 sessions, and we’ll be giving out the Win7 bits.
We also announced our in-depth symposia sessions including parallel computing and S+S.

If you have any questions about the PDC, feel free to check out the site listed above, or you can Ask the Brain.

The conference runs from October 27th to October 30th with the pre-conference on October 26th. You can see the full agenda here.

We have also just announced that all partners and customers attending the PDC will receive a very special gift this year: a 160GB external USB2 hard drive with all of the bits! That is a very cool gift and very useful as well. I’d love to hear if anyone is going or thinking about going to the PDC!

ASP.NET, Visual Studio and Vista

Tom — Thu, 22 May 2008 13:00:00 GMT

I know that Vista has been out for a while, but just in case people are looking for information on how to use ASP.NET 1.1, Visual Studio 2005, or Visual Studio 2003 on Vista, here are some very helpful links.

Of course the best option is to upgrade to Visual Studio 2008, but I understand that it isn’t always an option for everyone.

Hope that these links help.

ASP.NET Tips: What to gather to troubleshoot – part 1 – High CPU or Hang

Tom — Fri, 02 May 2008 19:13:18 GMT

On machines running IIS5 and IIS5.1, these are the Inetinfo.exe, DLLHost.exe and/or ASPNET_WP.exe processes. On machines running IIS 6 or 7, this is the w3wp.exe process.

The following steps will allow us to get log files of the processes hosting the IIS or ASP.NET applications, as well as obtain the thread ID that is using the CPU that will directly correspond to the log file. Please let us know if you have any questions about using this process.

Before the issue occurs

A. Download DebugDiag:
======================

Install the Debug Diagnostic tool
The default installation location for the package is C:\Program Files\IIS Resources\DebugDiag. It can be changed.
Make sure any other monitoring and debugging tools are not running.

B. Create a Performance Monitor log:
====================================

In Performance Monitor, expand Performance Logs and Alerts
Right Click on Counter Logs
Choose New Log Settings...
Enter a descriptive name
Note the log file location for later (or go to the Log Files tab and change the location)
Click the Add Counters button
Click the All Counters radio button. Click the Select instances from list radio button, and select the process hosting the IIS or ASP.net application. On Windows 2000 and Windows XP, this will be inetinfo, dllhost, or aspnet_wp . On Windows 2003 and Windows 2008 this will be w3wp. NOTE: It is possible you will see multiple instances of dllhost on IIS5/5.1 or w3wp on IIS6/IIS7 in the list of available processes. If you do, or if you are unsure of which process to monitor, please cltrl-click to multiselect all of the available IIS/ASP.net choices.
If the application is not an ASP.net application, select the following from the Performance Object dropdown, being sure to Add each one as you select it:
- Process
- Thread
If the application is an ASP.net application, select the following from the Performance Object dropdown, being sure to Add each one as you select it:
- Process
- Thread
- .NET CLR Data
- .NET CLR Exceptions
- .NET CLR Interop
- .NET CLR Jit
- .NET CLR Loading
- .NET CLR LocksAndThreads
- .NET CLR Memory
- .NET CLR Networking
- .NET CLR Remoting
- .NET CLR Security
- ASP.NET
- ASP.NET Applications
Click Close
Click OK

For the ASP.NET counters, select the version that you are wanting to monitor. Ex. For 1.1 framework, select ASP.NET v1.1.4322 and ASP.NET Applications v1.1.4322.

IMPORTANT: The Data Sampling Interval and time to start monitoring is subjective to when the CPU spike reproduces. Due to the log size, monitor the server to gather the needed data while not overwhelming the server.

Note: For more information on Performance monitor, see http://support.microsoft.com/?id=248345

After the issue occurs

A. Let the process run
======================
Now let the server run for a few minutes to document the environment in which the high CPU/hang is occurring in.

B. Capture the memory Dumps
===========================

Launch DebugDiag
- Start, Program Files, IIS Diagnostics, Debug Diagnostics, Debug Diagnostic Tool
From the Tools menu, select Create IIS Hang Dump

Repeat Step 2 every 1 - 2 minutes until you have 3 sets of memory dumps. Make sure the previous memory dumps completed before continuing to capture the next set of memory dumps. The multiple memory dumps will allow us to see if the process is progressing during the hang/high CPU symptoms or whether the process is actually performing work.

Files will be created in the following path by default:
C:\Program Files\IIS Resources\DebugDiag\Logs\Misc

C. Stop the Performance Monitor log
===================================

In Performance Monitor:

Right click on your log that is now listed under Counter Logs
Choose Stop Log

ASP.NET Tab Missing

Tom — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 16:47:01 GMT

A common issue we see customers having is after installing ASP.NET 2.0, the ASP.NET Tab is missing from IIS.

This tab is used for setting the version of ASP.NET and a lot of other things.

When this tab is missing, it can be rather difficult to get it to appear. So we now have a way to fix this quickly and easily. Just download the attachment to this post and follow the steps below:

This tool will run and fix the problem and get the tab to appear properly. The steps to run this tool are:

Close the IIS Management Console (inetmgr) and *any* other open MMCs.
Run the asptabtest.vbs. It will check various known issues, correct some of them, and write results to a log file. Use the output to determine whether the issue is resolved, and if not, what steps to take next.
Also note that after making any corrective changes to COM/DCOM settings, specifically DCOM security settings, make sure to either terminate (kill) ****ALL**** dllhost.exe processes, OR reboot the computer ****BEFORE**** testing again. Otherwise you may have well 'fixed' the problem, but a latent dllhost will prevent things from working. This is seen consistently when DCOM permissions were the problem.

Below is the output log of a working machine to give you an idea of the things it checks:

Bellow is what the output log of a working machine will look like... It also shows the different things the script checks.
PASS: The value of Enable32BitAppOnWin64 in metabase is set to: False

PASS: The current value of Restrict_Run is: 0

PASS: Successfully registered mmcaspext.dll

PASS: Successfully registered AspNetMMC
Microsoft (R) .NET Framework Assembly Registration Utility 2.0.50727.1433
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation 1998-2004. All rights reserved.

Types registered successfully
Assembly exported to 'C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\AspNetMMCExt.tlb', and the type library was registered successfully

PASS: Successfully registered Assembly

Running aspmantst.exe to test the ASP.NET Tab snap-in
Attempting to create the object as CLSCTX_LOCAL_SERVER.
Object created. Attempting to call method.
Method succeded. Result:
1.1.4322.0,C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322\aspnet_isapi.dll,2.0.50727.0,c:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_isapi.dll

Attempting to create the object as CLSCTX_REMOTE_SERVER to IIS6EN1.
Object created. Attempting to call method.
Method succeded. Result:
1.1.4322.0,C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322\aspnet_isapi.dll,2.0.50727.0,c:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_isapi.dll

Attempting to create the object as CLSCTX_INPROC_SERVER.
Object created. Attempting to call method.
Method succeded. Result:
1.1.4322.0,C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322\aspnet_isapi.dll,2.0.50727.0,c:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_isapi.dll

Special thanks to Jeremy and Vandana for creating the tool.

Useful appcmd commands

Tom — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 16:38:33 GMT

So with IIS7, there is a new way to get data out about your web server, using the new appcmd.exe process.

To start out with, the best place to start is with: Things you can do by piping appcmd commands

There are a lot of useful commands listed there that can start you moving ahead. If you want to see the full documentation, take a look at:

Getting Started with AppCmd.exe

Combining this with Powershell can we a really powerful idea. We can use a lot of different things to create some really powerful commands. The first one that I wanted to do is to iterate through all the applications in a given site and get the folders on disk. This can then be passed to a dir command to search for web.config files. This is useful for gathering all web.config files in the case of support. Or making sure you have things set correctly in all of them. The command is:

appcmd list app /site.name:"Default Web Site" 
/xml | appcmd list vdir /in /text:physicalPath

This will give a listing of directories which we can then run our DIR command against. I have tried to pass our data to DIR, but I couldn’t figure out a way to get it to work.

There is a lot of documentation on this out there already. Here are some additional links:

Recent IIS 7.0 updates

Tom — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 06:52:00 GMT

So there have been some new updates recently released for IIS 7.0. These updates add some additional functionality to IIS on Windows Server 2008. The biggest one is the addition of FTP: Microsoft FTP Publishing Service for IIS 7.0
Documentation can be found at: Microsoft FTP Publishing Service for IIS 7.0 (x86) Documentation

Another update that has released is WebDav: WebDAV Extension for Windows Server 2008 RTM is released!

We also released a beta: Bit Rate Throttling is now released

Another recent release: FrontPage 2002 Server Extensions for IIS 7.0

A CTP release: Web Playlist for IIS 7.0, 64 Bit (x64)

New: A CTP release: Administration Pack - including IIS reports and more

Some of these releases aren't for everyone. But they give you the ability to add them if they are something that matches your needs. Keep checking http://www.iis.net/ for additional updates.

There are also some great modules up there that you can download. Everything from enabling logging features in the UI, to backup features, and many others. Check out all the downloads available, especially under "Administration" from http://www.iis.net/downloads/default.aspx?tabid=3

And if you want to see some of the top KB articles around IIS7, check out this post.

ApplicationHost Helper Service - what does it do?

Tom — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 01:57:54 GMT

Another new thing about IIS7 is this new service called the ApplicationHost Helper. This serves two main purposes:

Configuration history
Application Pool Account Mappings

Config History

This is the service that will make backups of your ApplicationHost.config file. Which is very important in IIS7 as there is where all the settings for IIS7 now reside, instead of in the metabase.

You can force a backup to be created using the AppCmd tool. Or you can use the Module here to add it to your Inetmgr. This tool just calls into the ApplicationHost Service to make the backup. The service will also back up the config file periodically on it's own. You will see that you have a \Inetpub\history folder. This is where the service will place the backups when they are created. To change how often it backs up the file, you can add a configHistory section to the ApplicationHost.config file using the settings from here.

Note: Once we hit the max amount of backups, we will start recycling the oldest ones, so if you need to keep a particular version, be sure to copy it to another, safe, location

If you like what you are reading, get it from the source: http://blogs.msdn.com/tom

AppPool Account Mappings

The other purpose of this service is to allow you to lock down your content directories using user-friendly names. It allows you to use access control list (ACL) UI in Windows Explorer or the ICACLS command-line tool instead of using security identifiers (SID) to lock down the content. This service maps the accounts to the SID. This makes things much easier when it comes to locking down your content. You can also take advantage of the new account that gets created for the AppPool to lock down the content if you'd like also, see my previous blog entry for info on how that gets created.

If you stop this service, no backups will be made of your IIS settings and IIS won't be able to map the accounts correctly.

Automatic Application Pool Isolation in IIS7 - why you'll want to use this

Tom — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 20:02:44 GMT

So IIS7, which comes with the new Windows Server 2008 which just RTM'd, has a bunch of new features that are going to make life a lot easier for the web developer and administrator.

The one we will see today is called Automatic Application Pool Isolation. This basically means that when you create a new Site on your WebServer, IIS will create a new AppPool for the new site.

This shows the AppPool getting created when a new site is created. So what all does this mean? Well, there are a few things that are going on behind the scenes that are version important in regards to security and isolation.

When this is created, we will create a unique account on the machine that is based on this new AppPool using the NetworkService token.
Also, when this Application pool is created, we will create a new <AppPool>.config file for this process. And it is configured so that only the account we just created can access it.

These two things combined mean that we can now separate this application so that the configuration and the identity it is running under are isolated. All that would be left to do is set permissions on the content for the site and this site would be completely isolated from all other sites on this machine. This is a great thing for ISP's as they will be able to make sure one site's users cannot access another site.

ASP.NET Tips: Add trace statements

Tom — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 20:14:17 GMT

So I am going to start a new topic revolving around some useful tips for ASP.NET developers.

The first one is rather simple but very effective. When you are creating your site, it is a good idea to add some tracing to your application for times when you need to debug or troubleshoot a problem. For example, if you are having a performance problem with a particular page, you can turn on Tracing for that page and get a detailed report of how long different steps took for the page to execute.

To use tracing on your site, take a look at: Writing Trace Messages

As you can see there, you can get how long your code took to get from one logged trace statement to the next. This can really help you to narrow down where the bottleneck is that is causing the problem on your site.

There is a great example of this here.

If you are using IIS7, you can use tracing and get that output with your FREB log file, everything you need to set that up is located here.