VSTS 2008, ASP.NET Profiling, Error and What Not…
Was helping a client setup their ASP.NET application for profiling and we ran into some issues.
One of the main issue is the following error:
The web site could not be configured correctly; getting ASP.NET process information failed.
Requesting 'http://…/VSEnterpriseHelper.axd' returned an error: The remote server returned an error: (500) Internal Server Error.
We were running the profiling session on a Windows Server 2003 running Visual Studio Team System 2008 SP1, but I don’t think it matters at this point since I can reproduce the error on a Vista machine running VSTS 2008 SP1 also.
In any case, we tracked that the cause of the error is most than likely the web.config and perhaps how VSTS 2008 profiler is injecting its additional configuration settings into the web.config file.
I was able to reproduce the error in a couple of ways…
1. The appSettings element was pulling data from an outside source xml file, changing appSettings file attribute to configSource attribute will trip this error (This is actually what fixed the profiler after 2 days trying to figure this out – file attribute worked, while configSource attribute did not)
<!-- the line below will run in Debug / Release build,
but not in Profiling -->
<appSettings configSource="Settings\appSettings.config" />
<!-- the line below will run in both build and profiling -->
<appSettings file="Settings\appSettings.config" />
2. Adding a <location> tag for the root folder
Well, I just hope this can be of use for those of you who run into the same problem.
Have fun profiling.