Turn off Friendly HTTP Error Message to Debug ASP Pages

Quite often when you run an ASP application in your Internet Explorer browser you'll see the 'page cannot be displayed' message followed by the error 'HTTP 500 - Internal server error'. The error message is a generic error message and makes it hard to debug your application or page.

To make it easier to debug your application you need to select 'Tools' from the Internet Explorer menu and then select 'Internet Options'.

When the 'Internet Options' dialogue box opens click the 'Advanced' tab and scroll down to 'Show Friendly HTTP error messages'. Untick the checkbox. Then click 'Apply'.

Now if an error does occur on your page a more specific error message should be displayed such as the one below which makes things alot easier to debug.

Active Server Pages error 'ASP 0131'

Disallowed Parent Path

/siteroots/main/lxr/poll/admin/login.asp, line 1

The Include file '../includes/config.asp' cannot contain '..' to indicate the parent directory.