The team i belong to (Portugal Adcs) has a blog called Deviations ( http://blogs.msdn.com/deviations ) and from time to time i will post some stuff over there (when that happens i will put a link here). My latest post there was about live debugging using...

Time flies and it looked like it was yesterday that i wrote my last post. Last couple of months have been very busy, so blogging was put on hold but everytime i got a case that i believe i should talk about it, i kept it. So expect a burst on posts. Yesterday...

Monday was a day to forget. I arrived at the office around 8:30 am, started my machine (like always), inserted my credentials, the desktop shows up and suddenly it gets unresponsive. First thing I do is CTRL+ALT+DEL, start Task Manager and it also gets...

Part of my work is looking at huge log files and this can sometimes be a big pain to open in any text editor. I was talking with a coworker about this, and he showed EditPad Lite, a free text editor (for non-commercial use, you also have the non-free...

My team has started a blog. Since we all have different skills, it will be more generalist and there you can get information on MOSS, Biztalk, Troubleshooting, Dev, Silverlight and other stuff. Every time I post there I will put here a link to the...

Usually (probably always I hope) when troubleshooting production environments we don´t have Visual Studio or other “nice looking” tools to help us finding problems. But we have one of my favorite tools: Windbg. The first time someone showed me Windbg...

To me one of the most useful commands when using windbg is .shell. According to Debugging Tools For Windows documentation “The .shell command launches a shell process and redirects its output to the debugger, or to a specified file.” So, why would...

From time to time i get some memory dumps related to classic ASP. Last month I got some and the symptom was slow performance or event total hang with all requests just sitting around. Typically when i´m looking at a classic ASP memory dump I like to...

I´m starting a new section called Tips with the goal of showing commands that are very useful when doing memory dump analysis. The first one is on how to get a image loaded into memory to file. When i´m looking at a managed memory dump almost always...

Consider the scenario where you take several memory dumps from SQL Server because you are getting very high CPU without apparent reason. After looking at this memory dumps you notice that almost every thread has a call stack similar to the one below then...

Recently in one of our internal forums there was this thread around debugging different architectures (IA64, AMD64,x86) and the right environment to analyze the memory dump. If you have a IA64 memory dump then you will have to use a IA64 architecture...

I´ve decided to start a new section in my blog around tools I use that help me a lot in my daily work. But first I want to give a big thanks to everyone that has projects under CodePlex because there are a lot of excellent projects there and for the time...

If you are dealing with a memory dump (unmanaged) a very fast way to get an initial look is to use DebugDiag Analysis. It will provide you a nice report and it might help you. Sometimes in DebugDiag reports you will see a rebuilt stack trace like the...

Problems seem to occur in batches. Last week the hot topic was OutOfMemory exceptions. I got a memory dump that a customer took around the time they were getting OutOfMemory exceptions. I asked them to collect some performance counters so that we could...

In my opinion BLOBCache is a must have in most MOSS environments. It is known that BLOBCache and Web Garden are not the best of friends, and according to Optimizing Office SharePoint Server for WAN environments don´t use Web Garden if you have BLOBCache...

Most of my work is supporting and troubleshooting production environments and very often developers I work with say “We are having some performance issues in our website and we believe the bottleneck is in SQL Server. We have collected some profilers...

Sometime ago I had to troubleshoot a problem in Biztalk Server 2004. I was told that Biztalk Server 2004 apparently stopped working and the only way to get it back on track would be to restart the instances and we didn´t had errors reported. After that...