Jetbrains dotTrace: Profiling VS2008 Web Apps

We are currently running traces against a web applications that we are developing and one of my colleagues was telling me that the JetBrains dotTrace applications didn’t allow running profiles against the ASP.net web development server (it way grayed out). The reason was that only Visual Studio 2008 was installed, which by default puts the WebDev.WebServer.exe (which is the ASP.net web development server) into the c:\\\Microsoft Shares\DevServer directory instead of the old Visual Studio 2005 path which was c:\windows\Microsoft .NET\Framework\v2.x.y.z\.

There is a way to profile against the VS08 web server as described here, but you can also just copy the WebDev.WebServer.exe from the one directory to the Windows\Framework directory. This probably isn’t the best way to do it (because patches will only go to the original install directory), but with it dotTrace can start a profiling session with the ASP.net web server.