Determine which IIS sharepoint process is which

Sharepoint uses IIS pooled application processes to do its bidding.  Unfortunately, these all show up as w3wp.exe in taskmanager which makes killing or attaching to the right process a bit like russian roulette.

To see a nice list of all sharepoint related processes, use the following command:

C:\Windows\System32\inetsrv>appcmd list wp

This will display a nice description of all the IIS processes including the sharepoint instance that is bound to port 80.  The output of this command lists the process' PID so just use that when killing or attaching with a debugger.

Deploying Sharepoint Project from Visual Studio 2010 results in "Error: Object reference not set to an instance of an object."

When trying to deploy a Sharepoint 2010 project from Visual Studio 2010 I got the error: "Error: Object reference not set to an instance of an object" immediately with no other output in the build window.  Increasing the verbosity of the build output didn't help.

Turns out this was because I didn't have Package directory checked into subversion.  Adding this directory and the files underneath it (Package.package and Package.Template.xml) and svn updating my projected fixed the issue.