.NET news » Debug

A C#, C++, Delphi, ActiveX and Java trace framework and a trace viewer: Tail, outputDebugString, event log, and with Log4J, Log4Net, and Microsoft Enterprise Instrumentation Framework (EIF) support. This also comes with full support for Pocket PC development (C++ and .NET).

Instrumenting an application with tracing has become increasingly sophisticated as the .NET framework has matured. Find out how to use tracing in your applications, how to fine-tune tracing to your needs with custom listeners, and how to gain field-level and robust formatting control over the output.

Visual studio inbuilt debugger is a well known debugger, which offers both managed and mixed debugging options but at times when we need to debug memory related issues such as to optimize application performance, solve crashes or out of memory exceptions, then we really need to have a more powerful debugger, that can give detailed insight of objects on heap and GC...

Visual Studio Debugger Visualizers are a great addition to the developers debugging toolbox. Their purpose is to provide a custom view of data during a debugging session. This article will cover developing a simple string visualizer that allows the string to be replaced during the visualizer session. Additionally, necessary steps to debug your visualizer will be covered.

The article briefly discusses deadlocks behavior and presents an easy way to detect them.

Windows Vista has a very interesting new API called Wait Chain Traversal (WCT), which allows you to determine when and why a process is deadlocked. The good news is that WCT will report exactly what synchronization object you are deadlocking on. The bad news is that it only reports a limited set of synchronization primitives. Even with that limitation, it’s still a very useful API and something you’ll want to have in your debugging toolkit.

In this column, I want to discuss the WCT API, its usage, and its limitations. As part of this column, I give you a tool that pinpoints all the deadlocks supported by WCT. Because I insisted on writing the tool in .NET, I also get to show you a descent into the depths of interop despair and how I was able to get the WCT API working from the .NET Framework.

With Microsoft SQL Server 2000 it was possible to debug stored procedures from directly within Query Analyzer (see Debugging a SQL Stored Procedure from inside SQL Server 2000 Query Analyzer for more information). With SQL Server 2005, however, this functionality was moved out of SQL Server Management Studio and into the Visual Studio IDE. Using this technique, it is possible to step into your stored procedures, one statement at a time, from within Visual Studio. It is also possible to set breakpoints within your stored procedures' statements and have these breakpoints hit when debugging your application.

All editions of SQL Server 2005 include debugging support (including the Express Edition). However, only the Team Systems and Professional editions of Visual Studio enable stored procedure debugging from within the IDE. In short, if you are using Visual Web Developer or Visual Studio Standard Edition then you cannot step through a stored procedure or enter the stored procedure via application debugging.

In this article we will examine how to debug SQL Server 2005 stored procedures through the Visual Studio IDE. We will look at both stepping into a stored procedure directly from the IDE as well as how to set breakpoints within the stored procedure that are then hit when debugging the application.

Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) provides general-purpose, high-speed tracing of events raised by both user-mode applications and kernel-mode device drivers. Learn how ETW can improve your development and debugging work.

An extremely easy to use and incredibly fast tracer with lots of options.

When is the .NET Garbage Collector unable to reclaim memory? The answer might surprise you. Stay tuned.