I haven’t been coding too much in ASP.NET, and it seems like every time I sit down to do something in it, things have gone fubar in some random, unexplained way.

The latest example. I went to start a web app that I’d debugged plenty of times before and ended up with

Unable to start debugging on the web server. An authentication error occurred while communicating with the Server

Ok, start googling. 

I tried everything I could find to no avail.

Then I happened on Mike Volodarsky’s Server Side and this article.

I’d run smack into a full-on bug in VS2005, and not a small one. Mike’s post details why all of the alternatives have their drawbacks and then he presents his “Debug Assistant” that works around the bug and allows you to start in F5 debug mode anyway.

And even better, he updated the post with details about KB article 937523 that describes a hotfix to resolve this problem.

Unfortunately, the hotfix is one of those that MS insists you call them to obtain, but Mike makes the link available. It’s here.

Anyway, downloaded the hotfix, applied it, and I didn’t even have to reboot. Debugging works great (ie like it should have in the first place) now.

A big thanks to Mike, for posting about this bit of VS nastiness.

Now, it’s ~3hours later. What was it I sat down to take a look at in my ASP app again?