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“Mario Hewardt’s Advanced .NET Debugging is an excellent resource for both beginner and experienced developers working with .NET. The book is also packed with many debugging tips and discussions of CLR internals, which will benefit developers architecting software.”

–Jeffrey Richter, consultant, trainer, and author at Wintellect

“Mario has done it again. His Advanced Windows Debugging (coauthored with Daniel Pravat) is an invaluable resource for native code debugging, and Advanced .NET Debugging achieves the same quality, clarity, and breadth to make it just as invaluable for .NET debugging.”

–Mark Russinovich, Technical Fellow, Microsoft Corporation

The Only Complete, Practical Guide to Fixing the Toughest .NET Bugs

Advanced .NET Debugging is the first focused, pragmatic guide to tracking down today’s most complex and challenging .NET application bugs. It is the only book to focus entirely on using powerful native debugging tools, including WinDBG, NTSD, and CDB, to debug .NET applications. Using these tools, author Mario Hewardt explains how to identify the real root causes of problems—far more quickly than you ever could with other debuggers.

Hewardt first introduces the key concepts needed to successfully use .NET’s native debuggers. Next, he turns to sophisticated debugging techniques, using real-world examples that demonstrate many common C# programming errors.

This book enables you to

• Make practical use of postmortem debugging, including PowerDBG and other “power tools”
• Understand the debugging details and implications of the new .NET CLR 4.0
• Master and successfully use Debugging Tools for Windows, as well as SOS, SOSEX, CLR Profiler, and other powerful tools
• Gain a deeper, more practical understanding of CLR internals, such as examining thread-specific data, managed heap and garbage collector, interoperability layer, and .NET exceptions
• Solve difficult synchronization problems, managed heap problems, interoperability problems, and much more
• Generate and successfully analyze crash dumps

A companion web site (advanceddotnetdebugging.com) contains all sample code, examples, and bonus content.

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You get huge development advantages with Microsoft Visual Studio® .NET 2003—but you need a new bag of debugging tricks to take full advantage of them in today’s .NET and Win32® development worlds. Learn lethally effective, real-world application debugging techniques for .NET Framework 1.1 and Windows with this fully updated programming guide. Debugging expert John Robbins expands the first edition of his classic debugging book with all-new scenarios and bug-killing tools, tips, and techniques. You’ll see every .NET and Windows debugging scenario here—from XML Web services and Microsoft ASP.NET to Windows services and exceptions. Along with John’s expert guidance, you get more than 6 MB of his battle-tested source code—for the tools and tactics you need to ship better software faster!

Topics covered include:

• Where bugs come from and how to think about solving them
• Debugging during coding
• Operating system debugging support and how Win32 debuggers work
• Advanced debugger usage and .NET debugging with Visual Studio .NET
• Advanced native code techniques with Visual Studio .NET and WinDBG
• Extending the Visual Studio .NET integrated development environment
• Managed exception monitoring
• Flow tracing and performance
• Finding source and line information with just a crash address
• Crash handlers
• Debugging Windows services and DLLs that load into services
• Multithreaded deadlocks
• Automated testing
• The Debug C run-time library
• A high-performance tracing tool for server applications
• Smoothing the working set
• Appendixes: Reading Dr. Watson log files, plus resources for .NET and Windows developers

CD-ROM features:

• 6+ MB of professional-level source code samples written in Microsoft Visual C++®, Visual C#®, and Visual Basic® .NET
• Debugging Tools for Windows
• Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 SDK
• Windows Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT)

A Note Regarding the CD or DVD

The print version of this book ships with a CD or DVD. For those customers purchasing one of the digital formats in which this book is available, we are pleased to offer the CD/DVD content as a free download via O'Reilly Media's Digital Distribution services. To download this content, please visit O'Reilly's web site, search for the title of this book to find its catalog page, and click on the link below the cover image (Examples, Companion Content, or Practice Files). Note that while we provide as much of the media content as we are able via free download, we are sometimes limited by licensing restrictions. Please direct any questions or concerns to booktech@oreilly.com.

Get the essential, straightforward information you need—and master the core topics for debugging applications with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. Debugging expert John Robbins offers practical answers to real-world development questions, including code samples in Microsoft Visual C# and Visual Basic. You’ll learn the debugging techniques and tools to debug more efficiently and help ensure top-quality code.

Discover how to:

• Arm yourself with tools and techniques that contribute to long-term success in the debugging battlefield
• Implement John’s practical debugging process to sniff out bugs—including “freak” bugs
• Catch bugs during development with assertions, tracers, and comments
• Set advanced breakpoints in your debugger to specify exact trigger conditions
• Use the Watch window, Data Tips, and Visualizers to see key data quickly
• Employ other debugging tools, such as WinDBG, SOS, and ADPlus
• Write macros and add-ins to extend the Visual Studio integrated development environment
• Debug with Code Analysis—and learn to write your own rules

PLUS—Get code samples on the Web

Visual Studio .NET, and more specifically, Visual Basic .NET give developers more productivity and more power to develop applications, but at the cost of a complex development environment together with a whole new set of potential bugs. Debugging VB .NET Development analyzes the new defect types that arise with VB.NET, and investigates the debugging of every type of VB.NET application together with many common debugging scenarios. Mark Pearce also shows developers how to use the powerful new .NET debugging tools to find bugs wherever they hide, even deep inside distributed applications.

Debugging ASP.NET focuses on the various tools, techniques, and best practices associated with debugging ASP.NET web applications under Microsoft's new .NET platform. Brief descriptions of the problems with debugging previous versions of ASP are covered, as well as how the new features of ASP.NET can be exploited to their fullest to find and eliminate bugs quickly and easily. The book introduces changes to the code structure paradigm as implemented in the .NET platform, and how to structure ASP.NET code in this new paradigm to enable faster web application debugging.

Amid a booming market for third-party software debugging tools -- evidence that bugs and defects are a pernicious fact of everyday programming life -- there exists no single guidebook that adequately addresses the topic of debugging as a programming discipline. But with the upcoming publication of "Debugging Microsoft Windows Applications," developers finally get the practical, Windows-focused reference they need for finding and correcting costly coding errors. The book takes a holistic approach to debugging -- redefining "bugs" not just in terms of crashes and high-profile calamities, but including everything from user interface problems and performance issues to incomprehensible product manuals.

The first section introduces the "Zen of Debugging, " outlining what developers need to know both before and during product development Section two demonstrates how to maximize the vastly under-utilized built-in debugging capabilities in the Visual Studio "RM" product family. The last section of the book steps readers through specific debugging situations and their solutions, covering such topics as multithreaded debugging, crash handlers, and automated regression testing. Throughout, the book focuses on practical, tested techniques -- ready for work -- in the tradition of the award-winning Microsoft Press "RM" Best Practices series.

FreeBSD—the powerful, flexible, and free Unix-like operating system—is the preferred server for many enterprises. But it can be even trickier to use than either Unix or Linux, and harder still to master.

Absolute FreeBSD, 2nd Edition is your complete guide to FreeBSD, written by FreeBSD committer Michael W. Lucas. Lucas considers this completely revised and rewritten second edition of his landmark work to be his best work ever; a true product of his love for FreeBSD and the support of the FreeBSD community. Absolute FreeBSD, 2nd Edition covers installation, networking, security, network services, system performance, kernel tweaking, filesystems, SMP, upgrading, crash debugging, and much more, including coverage of how to:

• Use advanced security features like packet filtering, virtual machines, and host-based intrusion detection
• Build custom live FreeBSD CDs and bootable flash
• Manage network services and filesystems
• Use DNS and set up email, IMAP, web, and FTP services for both servers and clients
• Monitor your system with performance-testing and troubleshooting tools
• Run diskless systems
• Manage schedulers, remap shared libraries, and optimize your system for your hardware and your workload
• Build custom network appliances with embedded FreeBSD
• Implement redundant disks, even without special hardware
• Integrate FreeBSD-specific SNMP into your network management system.

Whether you're just getting started with FreeBSD or you've been using it for years, you'll find this book to be the definitive guide to FreeBSD that you've been waiting for.

No matter what your organization sells, a well-executed commerce solution can extend your business globally, boost profitability, and help you seize new opportunities faster. Drawing from their extensive, in-the-field experience, online business experts Clayton Peddy and Derek Armentrout teach you to quickly build and deploy a scalable, high-performance site using Commerce Server 2002. They detail how to customize your own solution—incorporating components such as a product catalog, a shopping cart, user profiles, content management, and data-warehousing and analysis capabilities. You get focused, field-proven techniques and hands-on instruction—along with reusable Code Candy from real-world solutions.

Discover how to:

• Determine the business and technical requirements for your site
• Create and manage user profiles and implement authentication
• Use Microsoft Content Management Server to manage page templates, images, product data, and other resources
• Design product catalogs that are easy to use and manage
• Build the browse, registration, and shopping cart pages
• Exploit little-known pipeline capabilities, such as inventory calculation and third-party order processing
• Capture and analyze data on user demographics and buying patterns
• Create campaigns, promotions, and awards for targeted users
• Manage site operations using the Business Desk modules
• Test, stage, and launch your solution