LEVEL A - SOS ... and Visual Studio

LEVEL A - SOS ... and Visual Studio

Did any one of you ever dealt with a LEVEL A ,  or at least LEVEL B crisis ?
I hope for you that not ! I know of at least two that this is their main bread and butter, One is Shmulik from Microsoft ( the last time I knew about him ) and the other is Gadi Meir.

What the heck I'm talking about ?

Let me tell you a real story, In my previous Company at some stage, I was given the leadership as a Team leader and Project manager of an about to fail project. What happened was that I was called to serve Queen and Country as part of the army reserves.

I WAS GONE FOR ONLY TWO WEEKS !! and what happened ?!? my replacement has managed to reach LEVEL A Crisis on the project ! or in other words there was a memory leak that was displayed in the former fashion - an MVC based ASP.NET 1.1 application that on startup loaded Tables into cache , thus consuming about 120mb of RAM. BUT, and this is a big BUT(!), about half an hour after the first hit the memory was about 1.5 GB of RAM !!!

Talk about a memory leak, "Auch, bauje' moi" ( Bulgarian/Russian for "Oh My God [what have I done ?!?]" )

Ok, after careful consideration with the client, we have decided to open a LEVEL A crisis ticket in Microsoft. Well what can I tell you ? dump files was my life 24-7 for at least two weeks ! :'( , my girl friend natasha was thinking of going to her mother's till it would all calm down , and this is half of it - what can I say emotions running high !

In the end the memory leak was caused by the use of a class about XML and Serialization that in the MSDN documentation was written as "blah blah blah ... blah blah blah ... do not use inside your code" ... I think it was this one XmlSerializerImplementation.CanSerialize or something like that ( because this is from .NET 2.0 , and mine was 1.1 ) ... or that XmlSerializerNamespace

Ok, after all these emotions , going to our point. I was going over blogs.msdn when I came across this SOS in Visual Studio Part 2. For those who've been there ( and came back to tell about it ) KNOW THAT SOS IS SOS (Son of Strike) !

Let me tell you THIS WAS NOT SOMETHING I WOULD REPEAT THAT EASILY !

Well ,TESS - If broken it is, fix it you should and Random Debugging Goodies - (Jackson Davis's Blog) are two blogs just about that !
Where in former of the two there's a nice, small, and modest collection

BTW, the first pic is from Counter Strike, and the 2nd is Halo 3 ... but I'm more into Sracraft.
Here waiting for Starcraft's 2 first Alpha :'(

Guy hilton, prepare your self to the greatest battle - "HELL IT'S ABOUT TIME" ;D