Most Common ASP.NET Support issues - Reporting from deep inside Microsoft Developer Support

Microsoft Developer Support or ("CSS" - Customer Support Services) is where you're sent within Microsoft when you've got problems. They see the most interesting bugs, thousands of issues and edge cases and collect piles of data. They report this data back to the ASP.NET team (and other teams) for product planning. Dwaine Gilmer, Principal Escalation Engineer, and I thought it would be interesting to get some of that good internal information out to you, Dear Reader. With all those cases and all the projects, there's basically two top things that cause trouble in production ASP.NET web sites. Long story short, Debug Mode and Anti-Virus software.

Thanks to Dwaine Gilmer, Doug Stewart and Finbar Ryan for their help on this post! It's all them!

#1 Issue - Configuration

Seems the #1 issue in support for problems with ASP.NET 2.x and 3.x is configuration.

Symptoms

People continue to deploy debug versions of their sites to production. I talked about how to automatically transform your web.config and change it to a release version in my Mix talk on Web Deployment Made Awesome. If you want to save yourself a headache, release with debug=false.

Additionally, if you leave debug=true on individual pages, note that this will override the application level setting.

Here's why debug="true" is bad. Seriously, we're not kidding.

Overrides request execution timeout making it effectively infinite
Disables both page and JIT compiler optimizations
In 1.1, leads to excessive memory usage by the CLR for debug information tracking
In 1.1, turns off batch compilation of dynamic pages, leading to 1 assembly per page.
For VB.NET code, leads to excessive usage of WeakReferences (used for edit and continue support).
An important note: Contrary to what is sometimes believed, setting retail="true" in a <deployment/> element is not a direct antidote to having debug="true"!

#2 Issue - Problems with an External (non-ASP.NET) Root Cause

Sometimes when you're having trouble with an ASP.NET site, the problem turns out to not be ASP.NET itself. Here's the top three issues and their causes. This category are for cases that were concluded because of external reasons and are outside of the control of support to directly affect. The sub categories are 3rd party software, Anti-virus software, Hardware, Virus attacks, DOS attacks, etc.

Read more: SCOTT HANSELMAN'S COMPUTERZEN.COM

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