SDP December 2011: .NET Production Debugging

Last Wednesday I delivered my last session at the SDP: Production Debugging of .NET Applications. After delivering a similar session in the June DevDays, I thought about how I can make it better by focusing on a smaller set of core debugging scenarios and making sure attendees get a chance to practice them first-hand.

Indeed, we had time to discuss and practice the following:

• Capturing crash dumps and hang dumps with ADPlus, Windows Task Manager, and Procdump
• Analyzing crash dumps in Visual Studio 2010 and WinDbg to find the exception that occurred and the stack of other threads
• Detecting memory leaks while the application is running or from an out-of-memory postmortem crash dump using ANTS Memory Profiler and .NET Memory Profiler
• Automatically looking for deadlocks using SOSEX’s !dlk command

If you’re looking for references and sample scenarios, make sure to check out my blog post: .NET and C++ Debugging Resources. I use it every time I teach my full .NET Debugging Workshop, which is packed with >20 hands-on debugging labs.

If you attended my session, thanks a lot for coming and I hope you’ve seen a glimpse of what production debugging can look like. The intimidating task of opening crash dumps or analyzing complex bugs can be fun if you have a set of core scenarios and patterns, and a great toolbox.

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