Introduction
I've used Nikhil's Web Developer Helper a number of times in the past for looking at what is sent back and forth across the wire, but until recently I had never bothered using the features on the ASP.Net menu. This was partly because I had never had the need and because I had never actually found out how to get that menu enabled. About a week or so ago I wanted a way to look at the contents of the view state for a page and so decided to work out how to do so using the Web Development Helper view state features. So I spent all of about 15 minutes googling to try and find out, asked my colleagues and nobody seemed to know – some remembered using those features in the past but not how to get them enabled. As it happened I just stumbled across the answer in the 'Pro ASP.NET 3.5 in C# 2008' book so thought I'd post the details just in case anybody else was foiled like I was.
Enabling Asp.Net Menu
It turns out that getting these features in enabled is really rather straight forward and probably very clearly documented in some read me file or something that I clearly just didn't bother reading, but anyway here we go:
- In the web site that you wish to examine add a reference to nStuff.WebDevHelper.Server.dll (an assembly that would have been installed when you installed the web development helper). In my case it was installed to C:\Program Files\nStuff\Web Development Helper.
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Modify the web.config and add the following entry to the httpModules section:
<add name="DevInfo" type="nStuff.WebDevHelper.Server.DevInfoModule, nStuff.WebDevHelper.Server" />
And that's it, in theory now you should be able to see all of te asp.net menu features enabled. That said, if you are using ASP.Net 3.5 you may not be able to see the decoded view state. I'm not 100% on this, but on the project I'm working on (ASP.Net 3.5) when I try to examine a decoded version of the viewstate in both the Web Development Helper (version 0.8.5.1) and Asp.Net ViewState Helper (version 1.1.0) I get errors: 'There was an unknown error parsing and decoding the viewstate' in the ase of the Web Development Helper and 'An error has occurred while Decoding the to the TreeView: The serialized data is invalid' in the case of Asp.Net ViewState Helper.