Lesson for the Day: Don't use XP Home for Development

As some of you know I lost the screen on my main laptop (HP ZD8000, a lovely machine at 13 lbs) so I sent it into support where they are going to fix it but take 2 weeks to do it. I took over my old laptop from my dear Tricia to try and make it work for a while.

To simplify her world, the laptop only had XP Home on it.  After getting the 3,000 things installed I needed to in order to work on my current project I am going to have to upgrade it to Professional.  The problem?  ASP.NET 2.0.

I am working on a project using the VS web server (not IIS would would have been an obvious Professional requirement).  But I started to get the dreaded “Unable to attach.  Binding Invalid Handle” error when trying to debug. Digging deeper it seems that it needs the VS Remote Debugger to work to debug in the VS Web Server (don’t ask me why…it *just* does).

Remote Debugger was running, so what was wrong I wondered?  I couldn’t even attach to other processes with a similarly cryptic error:

“Unable to connect to the Microsoft Visual Studio Remote Debugging Monitor name ‘XXXX’.  The binding handle is invalid.”

So I dug in the debugger (Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\ide\Remote Debugger\x86\msvsmon.exe) and ran it manually (after stopping the service).  It complained:

“Visual Studio Remote Debugging Monitor will not be able to debug applicaitons because the ‘Network access: Sharing and security model for local accounts’ local security option is set to ‘Guest only - local users authenticate as Guest’.  This can be configured with the ‘Local Security Settings’ administration tool.”

Great error message…a solution right?  Well, um…nope.  Local Security Settings is a tool that only works with XP Professional.  So I give up.  I am going to do the upgrade to professional and hope I don’t hose the machine and have to start all over.

Wish me luck…