Slow Chrome & Firefox Debugging on Windows 7.

These days I live in web browsers and all of my day to day work is browser based. Since I moved to Windows 7 I have had an issue where by Chrome and Firefox would take ages to connect to my local IIS instance. After suffering this for some time I decided to get to the bottom of it.

As it turns out (and there are a lot of false claim on Google!) it is as simple as ensuring you have 127.0.0.1 localhost uncommented in your hosts file. The hosts file can be found in \Windows\System32\drivers\etc. It would appear that if you use host headers for local development work then without this uncommented you are hitting the public DNS servers from what I can tell.

I should add that I am not running IPv6 and so did not enable ::1 localhost but you should if you are running on an IPv6 enabled network.

Installing Visual Studio 2012 (Windows 7)

Some things in life should be as simple but aren't! After years of installing various versions of Visual Studio you would think I would be prepared for battle but Visual Studio 2012 still managed to get me!

tl;dr Use this iso file to install Visual Studio 2012 Pro, the web installer doesn't work!

(As a side note, I long for the day where installing something on Windows is as easy as it is on *nix. I can install a whole operating system and associated programs in the time it takes to install Office! Alas, that is a separate post!)

Being a modern kind of guy I opted to try and install Visual Studio 2012 Pro via the web installer. I have a decent internet connection and was not expecting a 2 hour install. I was even more disgruntled when it failed! It apparently had not managed to install the Javascript or Sql 2012 tools packages. Reading the ever interesting log files provided no useful (translate : Google'able) info and so I tried to repair the installation. That also failed only this time with a longer list of failed packages.

I then decided I would try a clean install using the old fashioned iso provided by Microsoft. I tried to uninstall Visual Studio 2012 and .... it failed! (I can see a patten forming here.) I tried various things and finally after three tries managed to uninstall it. By try various things I mean I rebooted, I tried to kill various processes that looked like the installer was orphaning and clearing out %temp%.

I then installed this iso file (via the excellent daemon-tools). Forty minutes and another coffee later and it worked and installed.

You would think that in this day and age the web installer would be fail safe. It should know what packages you need download them and install them in a fast and successful manner. Come on Microsoft, it's not hard!