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We recently released a VS2010 sp1 QFE KB2650605 to solve a VB editor debugging problem. During VB web form debugging, VB web form may become un-editable if there are server tags inside. If you develop and debug VB web forms, you might be interested to download this QFE. http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?DownloadID=40811 Best regards, Xinyang Qiu Web Platforms and Tools Team Read More...

I’m working on an HTML application. It’s a Workout Timer and will become an HTML5 experiment that is “desktop deployable” and will store user profiles using HTML5 local storage, etc. Though the application is in the very early stages, I know where I’m going and I want everything to be highly configurable, and for those [...] Read More...

I am very happy to announce that Psscor4 is now available for download.  You can download it from: Psscor4 Managed-Code Debugging Extension for WinDbg This should have the same functionality as Psscor2 does but it works against the .NET 4.0 Framework.  Please let me know if you run into any problems downloading or using this extension.  I would also love to know if you have any feature requests for it. Read More...

From time to time I get questions about missing method names in the sos !clrstack output, like this: 0:019> !clrstack OS Thread Id: 0x5d0 (19) ESP EIP 0f31f340 7c80bef7 [HelperMethodFrame_1OBJ: 0f31f340] 0f31f398 1449167a 0f31f3c4 144915e6 0f31f3f4 10d81b48 0f31f4b4 793e25cf 0f31f4bc 79366b3d 0f31f4d4 793e2734 0f31f4e8 793e26ac 0f31f678 79e7c0e3 [GCFrame: 0f31f678] Jonathan Dickinson from SourceCode, just emailed me and told me that he had written an article about this and how to resolve it.  You can read the whole article here: http://jonathan.dickinsons.co.za/blog/2010/08/windbg-stack-fix/ Thanks Jonathan for writing that article. Solution: As mentioned in the article there are a couple of things you need to get rid of the problem...

I recently got a question about if it is possible to generate full user mode dumps automatically every time the process crashes (without having debug diag or adplus installed and monitoring your system). This would be useful for example if you are setting up a site, and you want to make sure you get dumps if it ever crashes so that you don’t have to repro the issue at that point, just to get data. It turns out that starting with Windows Server 2008 and Vista + SP1, Windows Error Reporting (WER) will let you do just that. It even worked on my Win 7 machine. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb787181(VS.85).aspx The documentation here says that “Applications that do their own custom crash reporting, including .NET applications...

I have written before about high memory usage caused by improper usage of XmlSerializer objects both in a case study and in a debugging lab .  The problem there was that every time you create a new XmlSerializer object with a non-default constructor, you generate a new dynamic assembly that contains the definition and methods for the serializer.  Since assemblies can’t be unloaded from a process unless the application domain they are loaded in is unloaded memory will keep increasing if you create new XmlSerializer objects until eventually you end up with a System.OutOfMemoryException. In the case of the XmlSerializer dynamic assemblies, they are quite easy to spot as you can look at meta-data (see previous posts) and figure out that...

It’s been a pretty busy few weeks at work coupled with some vacation so I’ve been lagging a bit with the blogging, so sorry for bombarding the blog with new posts now:) As you all know, Visual Studio 2010 just released and there is a lot of new content out there and I thought I’d mention a few in the debugging/troubleshooting space. ScottGu wrote a post on the VS 2010 debugger improvements as part of his VS 2010 and .NET 4 post series where he talks about news with Data Tips and Breakpoints. The Visual Studio Profiler Team Blog has a lot of posts worth reading about profiling in VS 2010 , including Silverlight Profiling and guidance for profiling. Steve released a new version of SOSex.dll with features that work for both 2.0 and 4.0 John Robbins...

I was helping out on an issue the other day where the process would stall if they added enough users in their load tests.  Btw, serious kudos to them for making load tests, so much nicer to work with a problem in test rather than when it is getting critical on a production machine. We gathered some memory dumps with debug diag of the asp.net process (w3wp.exe) and found that most of the threads were waiting in this type of callstack:  NOTE:  I have changed a lot of function names and code snippets since it is not relevant for the post. 0:071> !clrstack OS Thread Id: 0x21ac (71) ESP       EIP     1c8ceb88 7c8285ec [HelperMethodFrame_1OBJ: 1c8ceb88] System.Threading.ReaderWriterLock...

If you have ever tried to look at a System.DateTime or System.TimeSpan object in a debugger, you know how difficult it is to see what the value is.  For example, this is what a System.DateTime object looks like: 0:017> !do 0x040f59b8 Name: System.DateTime MethodTable: 60809f0c EEClass: 605e1fd8 Size: 16(0x10) bytes GC Generation: 2 (C:\Windows\assembly\GAC_32\mscorlib\2.0.0.0__b77a5c561934e089\mscorlib.dll) Fields: MT Field Offset Type VT Attr Value Name 6080ab9c 40000f4 4 System.UInt64 1 instance 633739266270770000 dateData 6082aa5c 40000f0 30 System.Int32[] 0 shared static DaysToMonth365 >> Domain:Value 0097ce58:03d6cad0 << 6082aa5c 40000f1 34 System.Int32[] 0 shared static DaysToMonth366 >> Domain:Value 0097ce58...

Continuing on from my previous post about DumpAllExceptions , here is another new update that comes with psscor2.  When you run !clrstack, you will now see the source and line information for the functions that are displayed.  This can be really helpful when trying to track down where a problem is and what path through your code this execution has taken. You don’t have to do anything to make this output display, it will automatically at the end of the line. The output will look something like: 02b9ef98 687db33a MyFile.DoWork(System.Web.HttpContext) c:\MyFile.cs:3710 .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space...