Not able to view all the running Worker Process in Visual Studio – Process Attach Window – Resolution

This might be a very simple and known to most of us, but I found  it as a query in a discussion forum of one of my article “Debug your ASP.NET Application while Hosted on IIS” which was published at Code Project . Question was regarding list of worker processes in “Process Attach window” of Visual studio. Though all the sites are running properly on IIS, still he was not able to view any processes in “Attach Process Window” while trying to attach a process from Visual Studio.

Well the exact question was below,

Visual Studio IDE Process Attach Window display below below information for processes

• Process Name
• ID
• Title
• Type
• User Name
• Session

In default view of Process Attach window, processes are filtered based on  User Name  which is current context user and the Session. So, if you are logged in with a user, let say “Domain\User1” and your Worker Process (w3wp.exe) is running on same account then only you can view the process over there. This is not only for the worker processes, it is true for all other processes as well.

So, if you worker process running on some other credentials ( Account on which your Application Pool Running ) , you won’t be able to see the worker process list .

To view all the process which are running one other credentials you have to select “Show Process from all users” and “Show Processes in all sessions” . On Select of the above two checkboxes you will able to view the all the running process from where you can select respective worker process (w3wp.exe) to attach.

Yes, pretty simple.  You can check out my answer here as well  http://bit.ly/nehkhH

Here is one of my old post where I talked about Identifying Worker Process (w3wp.exe) – IIS 6.0 and IIS 7.0 for Debugging ASP.NET Application . This will help you to identify a particular worker process when multiple is running. If you are using IIS 7.0 and upper version you can take help of IIS Manager to identify the same.  This post will help you to know more details. How to use IIS Manager to get Worker Processes (w3wp.exe) details information ?

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