ASP Development Environment - Tools

[Vasudevan Deepak Kumar]

Try these: 1) Html-Kit http://htmlkit.com/[^] 2) Notepad++ http://notepad-plus-plus.org/[^] 3) Visual Studio Express editions

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Tech Gossips
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[RichardGrimmer]

May not be what you're after, but the Developer Tools in IE (F12) allow you to debug server side scripts....

C# has already designed away most of the tedium of C++.

[Vasudevan Deepak Kumar]

RichardGrimmer wrote:

IE (F12) allow you to debug server side scripts

:confused:

Vasudevan Deepak Kumar Personal Homepage
Tech Gossips
The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep!

[barrysauer]

Try notepad++

[reilly96]

edlin

[DrDirks]

I know it's supposed to be able to debug server-side scripts and Firebug in Firefox too. Bug I've never been able to get either to "see" any code inside <%%>. I've also never been able to find a way to open a file in the debugger that hasn't been loaded yet and set a break point. Most of what I need this type of debugging for is PayPal Instant Payment Notification integration. When PayPal sends my website a notification it goes to a .ASP file that has nothing but <%%> code in it, no GUI so to speak. So the IE and Firebug debuggers never stop in that code. Maybe there's a way to do this that I don't know of?

[Member 7901751]

Microsoft Expression Web (around $80 US) works perfectly for .asp sites. Debugging can be accomplished rather well with Chrome using the "IE Tab" if necessary for checking out problems.

[randomusic]

For classic ASP I always use Crimson texteditor. It is fast, handles pure ascii with simple syntax highlighting, and has good handling of multiple documents, projects etc. Magnus

[Hack n Whack]

I had a similar gig a while back, perhaps even the same one. Maintaining a mammoth Classic ASP site with spaghetti, no worse, server side code and 1000's of pages, much of which was duplicated except for a word here or there. Nested includes, also duplicated, hardcoded connection strings all over the place, arghh. Finally had to tell the client I needed to move on, but I digress. VS works fine for debugging server side code. You have to set up IIS on your dev box to run the site locally, set IIS for local server debugging, run the site then from VS use Attach to Process to establish the connection to IIS. VS will break for you then. For client side debugging you can make use of IE's debugger (F12) or any of the other such as Firefox or Google's, they will step through client side javascript, oh wait, your site probably doesn't use javascript, not yet anyway (see below) :-). Once you get the debugging thing worked out you can slowly introduce more modern concepts such as javascript and ajax and even jump in and out of .NET for certain pages (I used MVC 3 cause the routing needs to be set properly, might be do-able for other view engines I dunno).

Steve the Coffee Guy

[mbielski]

Absolutely correct. Even full version Visual Studio 2010 still has the Intellisense for VBScript, and the HTML validation is very good. The deployment features of VS are fine, or you can use FileZilla for FTP transfers.

[remotedebugger com]

This is the software my company developed and we were selling it for the past decade: Team Remote ASP Debugger www.remotedebugger.com I think it's the best in the world. After my debuggers I can't use anything else, and many people over past years also appreciated it very much. And of course a lot didn't. Cheers Daniel www.remotedebugger.com

[RC Roeder]

LOL Welcome to my world. I use Visual Studio 2010, though any version will work. Debugging has alway been a pain, I suggest making sure that IIS is configured so you can see client side errors. Most of the time when the page errors you get nothing, the trick is delete everything in the page except a single letter refresh the page (to see the letter) then put the code back and refresh. The error will show up. I have several utilities (ASP Code) that I include even page to help debug. If you want them send me an email. I have been coding in ASP classic for over 12 years, the current project is over 300,000 line of hand typed code. Yes I should be using .Net, but until MVC 3 .Net could not do what I needed. Even Microsoft was stumped on how to do what I do. I have stuff on all versions of windows server from 2000 and up, every version of SQL Server from 2000 and up. RC

[kmoorevs]

Thought I was the only one. I am three months into an 'upgrade' for a decade old Classic ASP web app. Configuring the server-side script debugging has never worked well for me since they did away with the old MS Script Debugger. For server-side debugging, I just set a session variable to report errors/messages/sql statements/whatever and redirect to a special debugging page. It's kludgy but it works, and it means I don't have to be running on the local web server. For client-side, IE developer tools works great. As for my environment, the VS 2008 shell that comes with SQL Server 2008 works great. It has the intellisense for vbscript, javascript, and css. I haven't had to handle file uploads in ASP since IIS 5 when it was built-in component. I think you might have to throw a little .Net in to handle that part.

"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse

[jslo2007]

When doing "blind" debugging with ASP I used to place response.write commands (with the line numbers in quotes) in various random places to at least see how far the code would run. Then move them around as you get closer and closer to the line that's tripping. There used to be a great site called ASP 101 that had plenty of sample codes and explanations. Not sure if it still exists. It may have been co-opted and not as useful as it used to be, but worth a try. Hope this helps.