It is possible to debug your VB or C++ component while it is in operation in a IIS Web server. The following article talks about what you need to do to make this work.

Setup of NT Authority
You will need to give yourself authority to act as part of the operating system. To do this simply run the User Manager found in your Administration Tools from your Start Button. Click on Policies | User Rights. Check the "Show Advanced User Rights" box. Select the "Act as Part of the Operating System". Add your account to this category. Do the same for "Generate Security Audits". Now you will have to logoff and log back on to get your new ACL's.

Next you will need to stop the WWW Service and all other installed Web Services such as FTP and Gopher.

Visual Basic Notes
You will need to open your VB ActiveX DLL project and select Project | Properties. On the 3rd tab you will notice a check box on the right for "Build Symbolic Debug Info". Check this box. Now rebuild your DLL and install it on the web server your will be debugging.

On to Visual Studio
Open Visual Studio. You will need to have Visual C++ 5.x installed for this to work. A variation will work with MSDev 4.x as well. Open a new workspace ( File | Open Workspace ). Change the file type to *.exe. Find your inetinfo.exe file. New installations have it under your winnt/system32/inetpub directory. Upgrades from old IIS1.0 will have it under inetpub/ just above your wwwroot directory. Use this to open your workspace. Select Project | Settings, click on the debug tab. Enter -e w3svc into the command line box. Change the dropdown listbox to read "Additional DLL's" instead of "General". Now click at the top of the listbox and then browse to your DLL that was created by VB. Select OK. Now select File | Open in Visual Studio and open your .CLS file that visual basic is storing your class source code in. With this file open you can select the line you want to break on and press F9 to set a breakpoint.

Debugging
Press F5 to start the web service from within Visual Studio. Open your web browser and open the page that will run the section of code you just set the breakpoint on. When IIS tries to execute that part of the code it will bring Visual Studio up and let you step through your code.

If you have set this up and it is still not working try rebuilding your component. Make sure each step is followed exactly. If you still have trouble let us know what your did and what its doing. We can try to help out. Just drop us a line on the Mentor.

Good Luck,
Tim Cederquist
Senior Consultant