The day my Flex Debugger stopped working
The day my flex Debugger stopped working was the start of a very frustrating experience. I read forum after forum. To no avail I still couldn't get my Flex debugger to start working. I had a power failure a while back that completely wrecked Flex builder 2 to the point to where it wouldn't even open. I was forced to uninstall and reinstall Flex Builder 2. I got Flex Builder 2 working again but my debugger had completely stopped working. What would happen is my debugger would sit there and try and load and then all the sudden I would lose my internet connection and the debugger would stop running and display an error message that said check to see if flash debug version was installed. My first thought was oh okay no big deal I will just install the flash debugger again. You can find that here.After installing that I tried it again and still the same thing flex debug would never load.
I started reading forums. The first thing I tried was to write a very simple application to make sure it was in fact hitting the correct flash debugger version. My debug version and everything looked just fine. You can find the script I ran below if it does not come back with a debug version you will need to download it from the adobe web site here
<mx:Script>
import flash.system.Capabilities;
private function reportVersion():String {
if (Capabilities.isDebugger) {
return "You are running the Debugger version of the Flash Player";
} else {
return "You are running the Non-Debugger version of the Flash Player";
}
}
private function reportType():String {
return Capabilities.playerType + " (" + Capabilities.version + ")";
}</mx:Script>
<mx:Label text="{reportVersion()}"/>
<mx:Label text="{reportType()}"/>
</mx:Application>
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So at that point it still was not working. I decided I was just going to start fresh with Flex 3. I had acquired a license through Omaha Flex Camp thanks to Adobe so I decided to just give it a whirl thinking that would fix my problem.
I uninstalled Flex 2 cleaned up my registry, uninstalled EVERYTHING that has to do with flash including the player. I did make sure to download the flash player un installer from the adobe web site here. I read a forum that suggested using the un installer instead of using add remove programs. At this point I was willing to try anything to get back to my project! So I loaded flex 3 imported my project hit run worked great. I hit debug same thing happened. GRRRRRR!!!!!!!!!! I had asked just about everyone in the office at this point about what the heck it could be but everything they suggested it seemed I had already done. I went home that night from work pretty frustrated. I talked to my husband who is a systems engineer and we sat down and went through registry files etc to try to clean up as much as possible. Came into work the next day hit debug and it worked or so I thought! It ran once and then when I went to try it again it was doing the same thing. I started reading forums again and did see one interesting thing on how someone got their debugger working again. If you hit run on your project when it opens right click on it. You should see a menu like below.
If you click on Debugger it will pop up with this box.
They suggested setting it to other machine and using the local host IP 127.0.0.1. This worked for some people on the forum but not others. I am not running IIS locally so that wouldn't work for my situation but may work for yours.
Another suggestion was to set your debug in background to false. This can be found if you go to run-->then run and select other. you should have 3 tabs at the top. Select Common and at the bottom there is a check box for Launch in background. This worked for some people but again didn't work for me.
So I was beginning to think it was hopeless and it was time to format my PC. So I continued working just without my debugger. That can be tough at times which is why you are probably here. I still found it odd at this point as to why it would disconnect my internet during this process. I talked with one of the employees here Jake about my problem and we compared settings and so forth. We were not able to find any differences in our set up. I tried disabling my anti-virus and even my firewall for a short time to insure it wasn't being blocked. After I had pretty much given up on my debugger I started thinking about my internet connection and why the heck it would cause it to completely disconnect. A while back I was having some trouble with my on board NIC. I put in a new NIC and called it good. My debugger worked fine and everything was dandy then. I checked the back of my PC to make sure I was in fact plugged into the correct NIC and I was. I went into control panel-->network connections and hmmmm my on board NIC was still sitting there just not hooked up. I right clicked on it and hit disable. I opened my Flex again ran debug and BAM there it was. I jumped and cheered and gave my boss Mark Kruger a high five and went back to work. Hopefully this will save at least a few people from going through what I did.
I had trouble with "Launch in background" checkbox. When i uncheck it, Debugger running again!