Now that I have just refreshed the WSE2 samples with their original versions (thanks Bristowe), I am very happily debugging through them to see Don Smith’s lovely code for creating and issuing custom security tokens. My frustration had a lot to do with the fact that I know there is a goldmine of info in the samples and stepping through them with the debugger brings me so much farther than just reading explanations that don’t cover every single step.

And now I grok this stuff well enough to dare to dig in again and start mucking with it.

Here are some tricks about debugging into web services and into httphandlers that you never really understand until you have to use them.

Debugging web services from a windows client is sometimes a real mystery. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t and I never really understood.

I had this experience when debugging into the custom username token manager – sometimes I just couldn’t get at the code. (John Robbins ….I need to read your book cover to cover and that is all there is to it!!!) Hervey Wilson reminded me of Debug/Processes which helped enormously. I learned finally how to attach to a process that I couldn’t get into normally to debug. With the custom security token it was a bit different since I needed to attach to an httphandler that was not loaded before I needed it. Here you just need to attach to the aspnet worker process (aspnet_wp.exe) when you are at a point in your code that you know it is being used – and tada – you  can debug into the http hander. In the case of the CustomXML Security Token Sample, the httphandler is where all the goodies were.

Posted from BLInk!

yeah – I’m pouting. Whine whine whine…and whimper, too.

I’m coming up against one brick wall after another after another trying to run some of the wse2 samples so I can try to understand how some of these things work. I don’t know if I’m setting things up improperly or what. I wish I could get Don Smith to just come here to Vermont and sit with me for one whole day. I know I could figure everything out with someone to just point me in the right direction every time I go astray. But unfortunately these “astray-nesses” take me off track for hours and sometimes entire days.

So I’m pouting. Maybe just tired and time to call it quits. nah – that’s like giving up.

update for the kind souls who tried to comfort me after my very satfisying rant: I had two places to test this. The second is my tablet where I could use localhost, but I had mucked with the code a while ago and broke it and was not adept enough to figure out how to fix it. So John Bristowe was kind enough to email me a new sample directory (save those samples – you have to reinstall wse2 to get them again) and at least on that machine it’s all working again. But I learned a LOT as usual trying to track down the problem.