Flex/Flash Builder not connecting to debugger (hangs at 57%)
At some unknown juncture the ability to use the native Flash Player debugger (for either Netscape compatible browsers or IE) to debug my Flash applications from Flash/Flex builder stopped working. Whenever I debugged/launched the application (F11) the progress would stick at 57% and eventually the attempted connection would timeout.
I have found various suggested solutions and workarounds including reinstalling Flash Player debugger and using the standalone debugger outside of the browser. None were successful.
*SOLUTION*
The eventual solution was found here.
The jist is that you need to right click on an instance of the Flash Player in the browser or standalone instance and click on ‘Debugger’ in the context menu displaying the following dialogue box:
Then select ‘Other Machine’ and enter 127.0.0.1 as the IP address and click connect. This solved the problem entirely for me. It also implicated the initial problem, which seems most likely to be missing a value in the Windows hosts file (127.0.0.1 localhost).
I hope that this might help someone resolve this problem since it was the bane of my (working) existence for a while.
****UPDATE*****
After a little bit more digging and the re-occurrence of the problem I discovered that the problem is actually caused by the lack of a following record in the hosts file on Windows:
localhost 127.0.0.1
It appears that Flash Player debugger is floundering because it is referencing localhost but there is no domain to IP mapping in this hosts file. On Windows 7 (also on Vista and XP I believe) the location of that hosts file is here:
c:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc