Personal Technical History #2
Automating Debugging Sessions with Exception Monitor
While performing live debug sessions I noticed that CDB.EXE had a feature that would allow a list of commands to be executed. The trick was to put a file called NTSD.INI in the same directory as the debugger and the debugger would automatically run the commands in the file on start-up.
I also noticed that customers were not as comfortable running a series of batch files on their production servers as a tool that had a user interface and looked more official. So one day I had an idea. My idea was to create a wizard that would walk a customer through a debugging session. If you had a "hang" then you go down one path, if you had a "crash", then you went down another path
The tool ended up being called the "IIS Exception Monitor". The IIS Support team used this tool to list out the exceptions that were happening in a process and dump the call stacks. This was the first stage of automating the debugging process.
For nostagic reasons you may want to see the article that I wrote on the IIS Exception Monitor that was updated in August 2000.
