Unable to start debugging on the Web server
I ran into a weird issue today. I reimaged my machine and had Visual Studio 2003 and 2005 installed on it. I had an ASP .Net web service application created using VS 2003. So I tried to debug this application and all I would get was Unable to start debugging on the Web server
I could run the webservice from the browser by typing in the URL. I could run it from IIS by right-clicking on the aspx page and click "Browse", but debug I could not!
The IDE would not say anything and the help would ask me to perform the following steps:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/vsdebug/html/vxtbshttpservererrors.asp
I performed all of these and some things in addition but not luck. I was totally vexed and was almost about to give up when I gave one last shot. I went to the IIS server, right clicked on my Web application and looked at the Properties and verfiied each tab, and when I clicked on the ASP .NET tab, this is where I found the cause of my error. The ASP .NET version had been defaulted to 2.0 and my application was written in version 1.1 (I hadn't converted my web app to the newer version as I needed it to run on VS 2003).
I manually changed the version of this webservice application to 1.1 and now I'm back to debugging! So do not assume that opening a web service application in VS 2003 will have the IIS server set the right version for you. You may have to manually configure it esp if you plan to use both VS 2003 and VS 2005