"Unable to start debugging on the web server" - How to get F5 debugging in visual studio + IIS7

Many a time have I come across the issue of not being able to run debugging from within Visual Studio by hitting F5, and having to resort to attaching to a process.

For starters, lets assume the following

• Visual Studio is running in an administrative context,
• IIS7 is installed with IIS6 management options and Windows authentication enabled at a root level
• You are an administrator on your local machine.
• You are attempting to debug your web application which is running on said local IIS instance. The Web application project settings (Properties>Web) has been setup with the URL of the site

Hitting 'F5' results in an error from Visual Studio saying;

"Unable to start debugging on the web server. The IIS worker process for the launched URL is not currently running."

I've come up a blank after a couple hours trawling the web for answers, so I thought I would give StackOverflow a go.

If I get many good suggestions here then I thought it would be a good 开发者_JAVA技巧idea to start a checklist (which would hopefully turn into a wiki) of things one should try in order to get F5 debugging working.

"Unable to start debugging on the web server. The IIS worker process for the launched URL is not currently running."

This error message means that there is currently no ASP.NET worker process running on the host you are trying to connect to so the debugger cannot be attached.

Before hitting F5 make sure that

• You connect to the right host (a problem might be 127.0.0.1 vs. host name)
• There is a w3wp.exe process shown in Task Manager.

If the worker process is not running you can start it manually by opening one of the ASP.NET pages of your application.