Category: Win

VS 2005/2008 and Vista – IE cannot display the webpage

Vista and Visual Studio - problems with IPv6 and internal WebDev.WebServerI recently reinstalled my laptop completely (it is very nice Dell XPS M1330) and took that opportunity to make it into decent development machine (w/o all the stupid preinstalled applications).

Installed also Visual Studio 2005 and 2008, SQL 2005 Express and all the little tools necessary (ClipX for example).

Fired up latest web site on which I work on, F5 and … nothing – dreadfull message of “Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage”.

Ok, no panic here, let try Visual Studio 2008 with same web site; nothing 🙁 Same site, on two other development machines (Vista & Vista 64) under VS 2005 and VS 2008 works w/o problem.

Started researching and debugging; it turns out that next generation protocol IPv6, or its implementation on Vista clashes with integrated web server WebDev.WebServer.exe; WebDev has a problem finding localhost address in default configuration.

Easy fix for this is to comment ::1 entry in hosts file:

Uncomment ::1 in hosts file to correct webdev / visual studio problems

No restart is needed, either of computer or Visual Studio.

(to edit hosts file you can use notepad started with elevated rigths or “Run as administrator“; in Open dialog you type in %windir%System32driversetchosts)

How to Get Command Line of Launched Process

One nice improvement in Vista is enhanced Task Manager – apart from very good Resource Monitor tool, there are a lot of new attributes which you can select for running processes (View / Select Columns); especially interesting are:

  • Image Path Name
  • Command Line:

Vista - Task Manager - ‘Image Path Name’ and ‘Command Line’ attributes of an process

However, Microsoft can make some tasks much complicated that they should be; reasonable expectation is that each standard application (and Task Manager is one – it is part of Windows operating system) supports at least basics of Copy / Paste – getting data displayed in a grid in some text format.

For Task Manager that is not case 🙁 – there is no way (to my knowledge) to get displayed data from grid in some text form which you can use later.

Solution for this particular problem (and many other related) is in excellent SysInternals package: ProcessExplorer will display full information about selected process and allow you to copy that info on Clipboard:

SysInternals - Process Explorer - Details about process

Best of all, this nice tool is not tied for any particular Windows version – it will work in Windows 2000, XP or Vista.