Personal Technical History #3
WinDNA... My Love of Debugging Continues
The term WinDNA was used to describe the architecture of applications that utilized the latest Microsoft technologies of the time. The time was approximately 1998 and WinDNA stood for Windows Distributed interNet Application architecture. Windows 2000 was just shipping along with IIS 5.0 and COM+. Also customers started building applications on Commerce Server 2000 and SQL Server using Active Server Pages (ASP) and COM/COM+/DCOM. Most customers wrote Visual Basic 6.0 COM components though there were some components written in C++ ActiveX Template Library (ATL).
First you build it.. Then you deploy it.. Then you debug it.
When troubleshooting WinDNA applications, I found that I was executing the same debugging steps and asking the same questions over and over. One customer that I was working with wanted to know how I did what I did and whether I could package that information for others to learn as well. As a result, I presented and recorded the following video about Support WebCast: Debugging Windows DNA-based E-commerce Applications. A co-worker created a document that walks through Debugging Windows 2000 Web Applications which was a useful guide at the time.
Tools for the times...
As mentioned in the support web cast, the types of tools that were used depended on the problem at hand. There were three buckets of problems.
They were:
- Crashes (Errors like ASP 0115)
- Hangs (Non-responsive web servers or applications)
- Resource issues (Memory Leaks or CPU Spikes)
In order to troubleshoot these scenarios, the tools used were:
- Exception Monitor 7.0
- UserDump
- Performance Monitor / UserDump / Exception Monitor etc.
ADPlus was born...
In time, Exception Monitor and UserDump were replaced with a new tool called AutoDump+ (ADPlus). The etymology for the name ADPlus came from a script that a co-worker wrote called AutoDump.vbs. I believe that this script looked for the IIS and COM+ related processes and created full process dumps for them. The tool was greatly enhanced to have -crash and -hang modes along with a number of additional features and capabilities. Keeping with the convention that the next version a product was the product name with "+" appended, the name ADPlus was chosen.
Eventually, the WinDBG team included ADPlus.vbs in the publically available Debuggers package and customers were able to download and run it to resolve support issues.
[Next I will blog about the PDC 2000 and the introduction to the .NET Framework and ASP.NET]
