geekroom

I’ve spent several hours now trying to make what should be a trivial change in an asp script. Some of the wasted time is just my lack of knowledge — having to look up functions and syntax to do basic stuff. But the process is made much, much worse by my inability to get any kind of debugging info back from the server. If there’s any kind of syntax or run time error, I just get a 500 error back. I spent an hour trying to get the MS script debugger to debug the script as it is supposed to do, but even after following the convoluted instructions, it just won’t fire up to debug the asp script. So I’m reduced to inserting response.write/response.end statements at incrementing lines until I find where the problem is. Bleh.

Now I need to make the script sleep for a second, and it turns out there’s no way to do this out of the box with ASP. How the hell do you forget to (or worse decide not to) put a sleep function into a programming language? The helpful advice from the aspfaq.com suggests either downloading an add on component from a third party or connecting to an MS SQL server and asking the server to sleep for you (?!?!?!?!).