Attaching debugger to IIS process in Visual Studio

Intro

The developer needs to debug web application. The web application is running on IIS.

Attach to process

Open your project in Visual Studio and build it. Then go to Debug → Attach to Process (Ctrl + Alt + P).  See picture below.

Attaching to IIS process in Visual Studio

In 'Attach to' section select appropriate code type if you know it, otherwise you can keep it as default 'Automatically determine the type of code to debug'. In such case, the appropriate debugger will be selected based on the kind of code that is running.

To make sure that 'Available processes' windows shows your IIS process, check 'Show processes from all users' checkbox. Then use the filter to find all aspnet_wp.exe, w3p.exe, or w3wp.exe processes. 

Multiple w3wp processes

Which w3wp.exe PID corresponds to which application pool? This is the question you will face if you have multiple web applications running on your machine.

In IIS7+ and Windows 2008+, you can use appcmd.exe utility to determine which PID belongs to which IIS process. Open command prompt as Administrator → navigate to %windir%\system32\inetsrv\ → run following command:

cd/d %windir%\system32\inetsrv\

appcmd list wp

The output of the command will show which PID belongs to which IIS process. See picture below.

The output of appcmd utility execution

Please read the following article to learn more about AppCmd: Getting Started with AppCmd.exe

Fix Jenkins SMTPSendFailedException on Windows and Ubuntu 16.04

Intro

By default, Jenkins has disabled mail.smtp.starttls option and if you want to send notifications through any SMPT service which requires TLS, for example, through Gmail SMTP server, you need to enable this option. If the option is disabled you receive the following exception:

com.sun.mail.smtp.SMTPSendFailedException: 
530 5.7.0 Must issue a STARTTLS command first. q15sm1393424wra.91 - gsmtp 

Fixing SMTPSendFailedException on Windows

1. Navigate to Jenkins installation folder. To find out exact installation folder you need to navigate to 'Manage Jenkins' page and check 'Home directory' property. By default home directory should be 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Jenkins'

2. Open 'jenkins.xml' and add '-Dmail.smtp.starttls.enable=true' to arguments. See XML-code snippet below:

<executable>%BASE%\jre\bin\java</executable>
<arguments>-Xrs -Xmx256m -Dhudson.lifecycle=hudson.lifecycle.WindowsServiceLifecycle -Dmail.smtp.starttls.enable=true -jar "%BASE%\jenkins.war" --httpPort=8080 --webroot="%BASE%\war"</arguments>

3. Restart Jenkins by navigating to {base_jenkins_url}/restart URL.

Fixing SMTPSendFailedException on Ubuntu 16.04

Basically, the steps are pretty the same as for Windows. First of all you need to figure out where Jenkins stores it configuration. By default, it should be '/etc/default/jenkins' file.

1. Open '/etc/default/jenkins' file.

2. Add '-Dmail.smtp.starttls.enable=true' to Java arguments.

# arguments to pass to java

# Allow graphs etc. to work even when an X server is present
JAVA_ARGS="-Djava.awt.headless=true -Dmail.smtp.starttls.enable=true"

3. Restart Jenkins by navigating to {base_jenkins_url}/restart URL.

Recursively copy files of a specific folder into a single flat folder on Windows

Recursively copy files of a specific folder into a single flat folder on Windows

Use following script, with appropriate folders.

@echo off
for /r "{full path to source dir}" %%a in (*) do copy "%%a" "{full path to flatten dir}"

VirtualBox: Accessing shared folder from Ubuntu guest

Preconditions

• VirtualBox is installed.
• Ubuntu 16.04 is running in VirtualBox.

Instruction

1. Create shared folder. Click settings → Shared Folders → Click 'Add a new shared folder' button.

2. Specify name and path to the folder you want to make shared.

3. In VirtualBox click 'Devices' → Insert Guest Additions CD image → Run with sudo permissions VBoxLinuxAdditions.run program from mounted disk.

4. Make folder

sudo mkdir /home/{user_name}/shared-folder 

5. Mount the folder with the command:

sudo mount -t vboxsf {folder_name_from_step_2} /home/{user_name}/shared-folder

6. Done.

PHP Composer installation: The openssl extension is missing

Composer installation

To install Composer on Windows you have to follow documentation https://getcomposer.org/doc/00-intro.md#installation-windows. 

The openssl extension is missing issue

During installation "The openssl extension is missing..." issues could happen. 

Installation tool helps you to identify php.ini file location. As you already understood, we have to do some modifications in php.ini file to fix the issue. If you have empty php.ini file, then just add following code there:

extension_dir = "ext"
extension=php_openssl.dll

Otherwise open php.ini and uncomment php_openssl.dll extension and specify correct directory for PHP extensions.