3 years have gone by and I still haven't had a resource assigned to provision the new web server. So I'm stuck with local development and deploying test sites in production to test. My current employer for instance has never setup a QA web server. I've also been put in situations due to the businesses I've worked for in which the developers are put in a bad position in which it's necessary to do so. Yes as others stated you can use other tools to debug a production support issue on the web server or remotely but there are legitimate reasons to install Visual Studio on a production web server. I come at this with a different point of view.

So are there reasons someone might install Visual Studio on a production web server? Yes, it could be useful. You might do a quick search for project files in user folders, if you have accesss. I sincerely hope nobody is actually writing code on this machine. Someone also might be using it a very expensive editor for viewing XML, config, or html files, but that is not a legitimate use. However, if all they need is a memory dump, there are other more efficient means of gathering one: Task Manager, Process Explorer, etc. Someone could use Visual Studio to attach to the w3wp.exe process and save a memory dump file. The few times I have had to debug a running process on a customer system, I downloaded and used WinDbg.Ī better option for debugging production systems is to use tracing, logging, and memory dumps. For us, as an ISV, it is not, because we often connect to customer systems via LiveMeeting and other very unproductive means to diagnose problems in production. Depending on the setup, remote debugging might be a better option. One possible use is to attach to the web server and debug some kind of error or memory leak that has proven impossible to find on a development machine.

Visual studio on windows