PRB: "ASP_DEBUG_INFO" Tag Is Inserted into HTML When You Debug with Visual InterDev 6.0 (297995)

SYMPTOMS

When you view or debug an Active Server Pages (ASP) page, you may notice that the following tag is inserted into the resultant HTML at the top of your page:

<!-- METADATA TYPE="ASP_DEBUG_INFO" -->

When this tag is inserted into the resultant HTML, it may cause problems in the following scenarios:

When you generate XML in your ASP page and send the XML to the client rather than HTML.
When you use the Response.BinaryWrite method to stream binary data to the client (for example, a Microsoft Excel document).

CAUSE

ASP sends down this tag when the following two conditions are met:

The Enable ASP client-side script debugging flag is enabled for the Web application.
An ASPCLIENTDEBUG cookie is present on the client that makes the request.

Typically, when you use automatic debugging with Visual InterDev 6.0, both of these conditions are met. The Visual InterDev debugger requires this tag at run time to automatically map breakpoints in the client script.

RESOLUTION

To resolve this problem, use one of the following methods.

Method 1

Disable the Enable ASP client-side script debugging flag as follows:

In the Internet Services Manager, right-click the Web application with which you are currently working, and then click Properties.
Click Configuration.
On the App Debugging tab, clear the Enable ASP client-side script debugging check box.

Method 2

Delete the ASPCLIENTDEBUG cookie from your client computer as follows:

On your computer, search for a file named username@applicationname*. For example, if the user name is "johndoe" and the application is named "myapplication," search for the johndoe@myapplication* file.
After you locate the file, delete it.

NOTE: If you need to debug in the above-mentioned scenarios, you must manually debug the application. For additional information about how to manually debug an application, click the article numbers below to view the articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

196378 HOWTO: Debug ASP Applications Manually Against Windows NT 4.0 Web Server

258929 HOWTO: Debug ASP Applications Manually Against Windows 2000 Web Server

REFERENCES

For additional information about debugging and for a list of debugging resources, click the article number below to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

244272 INFO: Visual InterDev 6.0 Debugging Resources