About this time yesterday I put together a huge post about my initial experiences with IIS7.0. I retracted it because it was essentially a rambling and pointless expression of my frustration at getting a response from my CGI binaries.
I've come from a much better product (IMO), Apache. Since I'm primarily WINTEL. I want to produce a site to sell my software on, and it's natural that I don't want to have to faff around with ASP. Most people seem to serve up Apache on Linux, so I'd have to change my own libraries, to sit on a Linux platform. It's natural that I'd want to use ISAPI or CGI under IIS to produce a relatively limited website that I could deploy to any number of ISP's. BUT!
IIS on Vista seems virtually impossible to debug. I appreciate that runnning services in session 0 is better in many ways. I'm considering buying into ORCAS, but I've downloaded it, and it doesn't seem to offer any specifc help in this respect, over and above say..... VC6! I appreciate that I could try to be be a guru and and get a remote debugger wedged into Session 0. I might actually figure out how to do that, the thing is I'm one person against the world, and I just don't have the time to faff about like this. I have no desire to learn ASP, or worse PHP.
My existing CGI binaries aren't responding, and although I've found a couple of the problems with them (both small but critical standards issues which are tolerated in Apache), my wider sense suggests that I need to rationalise the way that I approach this problem. With this in mind I have produced basic working ISAPI extensions today, in the hope that they may help with my debugging issues. I know I could migrate from CGI to ISAPI with ease, but I still couldn't debug.
I'm looking for a way to debug IIS ISAPI, FastCGI, or plain CGI extensions. I obviously want to do it in a civilised debugger. I don't want to have to keep compromising the setup by loading and unloading services, and tweaking the registry (I'm not particularly worried about the security for development activities). Solutions to the above problem for me would be any of the following;
Running a temporary instance of IIS in Session 1.
Using a dedicated test harness for ISAPI extensions.
Using inherent support from an application like ORCAS to automate the process of attaching to (and in the case of CGI apps) catching processes that are running inside session 0.
I'm fairly sure that none of these options are available (at least in a form that I could afford), and I find it a shame that Apache can whip the butt of MS in this way. If anyone has any kind of solution that allows me to debug in a civilised way, I'm all ears.