Question

We are developing ASP pages for a Windows CE device. We need to debug the ASP pages for reducing the development effort. The ASP pages uses a COM component for getting data from the device. The web server running on the Windows CE device is Httpd.

How can we debug the ASP pages running in Windows CE device?

Answer 1

You’ve run into one of the many joys of developing using the ASP server that ships with Windows CE. There is usually no way to do live debugging so you’re largely relegated to using alert statements or DEBUGMSG from a COM component.

The one exception, and it’s not all that easy either, is if you’ve created your own OS image and you have a BSP with KITL enabled. In that case you can build an OS with the debug version of the web server in it, deploy the OS from Platform Builder, attach with KITL and set break points down in the server code. You can then use those to step into the parsing of your own ASP page. It’s a complete headache.

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Attempting to write anything useful with the built-in ASP server is so bad that we actually wrote a complete replacement. Our Padarn Web Server supports a subset of ASP.NET, was designed for CE (though it runs on the desktop as well) and best of all you can use C#/VB.NET and the Visual Studio debugger for your page code behind. The only downside is that it’s not free – though if time is of any value, it certainly costs less than trying to use the built-in server.