ASP .NET Development Server not serving everything

Question

I'm using Visual Studio 2005 on a Windows XP SP3 machine and recently have come accross a some what strange issue.

I have a C# and ASP.NET project that runs fine when on the team test server and using IIS locally on my own machine. However, running it using the in-built Visual Studio ASP.NET Development server it doesn't seem to serve all the images/scripts/css files all of the time. When I load a page one time images A, B and C will be missing and I may get a system (sub-package) error however loading it again all those images will be there and the sub-package will work but a CSS, a script or any other image file may be missing.

The Windows event application log seems to show occasionally the missing files will be logged but this isn't consistent either.

Answer 1

Check the page in Firefox/Firebug or with IE8 and see if the paths to the files/scripts/images is correct or not. A common problem when switching between the local dev webserver and IIS hosted pages is that the paths may not resolve the same. You can fix this sometimes by using the "~" character before a path in the asp code.

Answer 2

It happens to me all the time; I think the reason is that the ASP.NET Develoment server is not a very good HTTP server, and when receiveing too many requests, it drops some ones.

Since it is also very very slow, I configured vs2008 (you can do that with vs2005, of course) to use ASP.NET for debugging; it works far better that way.

To do that:

Project -> properties -> Web (last tab) -> Server. There are three alternatives: Use Visual Studio Development Server; Use local Web IIS; Use custom Web server. Choose the second. (not sure about the exact english names: I have the Italian version of VS).