Do not have permission to debug on the server (?)

[~~~ .NET Ed ~~~]

Hi,
First of all I my development environment is a Windows XP Professional
machine. For security reasons my development account is a limited account, I
only use the other account (with administrative privileges) for installing
software and changing configuration, etc.

The problem I am facing now is that I cannot debug my ASP.NET application. I
want to be able to single step through my asp.net code under my
"Development" account (which I also use for web browsing). Unfortunately
when I attempt to do so I get an "Error while trying to run project: Unable
to start debugging on the web server. Access is denied." pop up error.

I followed the steps to make the framework's temporary asp.net folder have
my user account on it with full permissions. But I feel uneasy about placing
my password in clear text in the machine.config file. Is there any other way
to do that?

Regards,

 

[Scott Allen]

Hi .net Ed,

There are two approaches I know of that you can use.

1) Add your account to the Debugger Users group. Unfortunately, this
gives your account SeDebugPriveledge which is mighty privileged in and
of itself. The problem you are facing is that you need
SeDebugPriveledge to be able to break into a process running under a
different security context. So...

2) Run the aspnet process worker process under your account. Yes, this
requires your username and password in the machine.config file, but,
it can be encrypted. See:

Use the ASP.NET Utility to Encrypt Credentials and Session State
Connection Strings
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=329290

To do #2, you'll also need to set the correct permissions on all the
folders, but it sounds like you have that done.

HTH,