Here’s an overview of how WebAPI binds parameters to an action method.  I’ll describe how parameters can be read, the set of rules that determine which technique is used, and then provide some examples.   [ update ] Parameter binding is ultimately...

We have a pure C#/IL managed debugger sample, called MDbg. It's available on MSDN at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=38449a42-6b7a-4e28-80ce-c55645ab1310&displaylang=en . For a variety of reasons, this sample only runs on...

For anybody looking for the full source to a bootstrapping C# compiler, today’s your lucky day. A while ago (back in 2001 before we shipped v1.0), I wrote a C# compiler called “Blue”. I know it’s 3.5 years after I wrote it, but I figured releasing it...

Funceval (aka "Function Evaluation" or "Property Evaluation") is the ability to inject some arbitrary call while the debuggee is stopped somewhere. A debugger commonly uses funceval to run ToString() and property getters. I want to describe when it is...

C# doesn’t support inline IL. As an experiment, I wrote a post-compiler tool that allows primitive IL inlining for C# / VB.Net (or any .net language). (My main goal here was I actually wanted to try out fxcop and needed some pet project to do it with...

MDbg is a debugger for managed code written entirely in C# (and IL), which started shipping in the CLR 2.0 SDK. I have so many MDbg posts, that I'm losing track of them. And others have had some good posts too. For my own organization, I need to create...

The ContextSwitchDeadLock MDA (I blogged about MDAs here ) sometimes fires under the debugger. MSDN says: It is possible for this MDA to be falsely activated when all of the following conditions are met: * An application creates COM components from...

The CLR debugging services have added a lot of great things in v2.0. The main theme for us has been improving the Rapid Application Development (RAD) experience. Here’s a list of new features: 1) Edit-And-Continue . EnC is the ablity to edit code while...

Visual Studio's IDE will copy code as RTF (Rich Text Format). Web browsers like HTML. So posting code from Visual into blogs means a decent RTF to HTML conversion. And having a technical blog means posting code. So I needed to solve this conversion problem...

The CLR supports the ability to generate code at runtime (Reflection.Emit). This is great for the many dynamic languages targeting the runtime (such as Iron Python ). We also support that ability to provide debugging information for that code so that...

The .Net frameworks provides the System.Diagnostics.StackTrace class which allows you to get a stack trace at runtime. This can be handy for diagnostic purposes such as implementing an assert dialog. However, beware of the following about the StackTrace...

Previously , I added IronPython scripting support to a real existing application, MDbg (a managed debugger written in C#). In this entry, I'll go through step-by-step how I did that. I'll call specific attention to the goofy issues so that it should be...

FYI, in case you haven't heard from everybody else saying the same thing a month earlier, CLR Profiler for .NET 2.0 is available for free download here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=A362781C-3870-43BE-8926-862B40AA0CD0&displaylang...

If you want to create a new thread in your process in C#, you can use Thread.Start . But things are a little harder if you want to create a thread in another process, ala kernel32!CreateRemoteThread . Disclaimer : CreateRemoteThread is evil, could dead...

Sometimes developers want to debug just the code they wrote and not the 3 rd -party code (such as framework and libraries) that’s also inside their app. This becomes particularly useful when user and non-user code call back and forth between each other...

The source for the Winforms GUI extension to MDbg is now available as a sample. (Sorry it took so long). The download is available here . I’ve also updated the original post with this link. Here's a screenshot of the updated gui:

I wrote some C# sample code to get an ISymbolReader from a managed PDB (Program Database) file and then dump it back out as XML. The managed PDB stores all the source-level debugging information such as: - the mapping between IL offsets and source lines...

Sometimes you’re looking at the callstack that’s in a handler after an exception was thrown. This is very common if you attached at an unhandled exception that popped up a watson dialog. It might look this like: kernel32!WaitForSingleObject+0xf devenv...

It's natural for a tool to use Reflection-Only loading to load an assembly and view the types in it. For example, I used this in my pdb2xml tool. However, I missed an important detail that I wanted to warn you about after getting it wrong myself. Consider...

The ProcessStartInfo.CreateNoWindow property says "Gets or sets a value indicating whether to start the process in a new window." and later " true to start the process without creating a new window to contain it; otherwise, false . The default is false...

Whidbey has has added Manage Debug Assistants (MDAs), which are like advanced log messages for diagnostic information. These things are awesome. There appears to be very little written about them. You can enable them in the VS exception dialog. You can...

I was wondering how well properties were integrated into C#. For example, C# lets you use += with the properties. It's easy enough to convert: MyProperty += 4 to MyProperty = MyProperty + 4 However, C# won't let you pass a property in as a ref parameter...

Managed applications are compiled to IL (Intermediate Language) and then our JIT (Just-In-Time compiler) can compile it to native code so that the CPU can execute it. (The alternative is interpreting the IL directly, which has horrible performance characteristics...

My name is Mike Stall, and I'm a developer on the CLR (also called the .NET runtime and a host of other names). I currently work on the CLR Debugging Services along with some other folks. We design and implement the managed debugging API exposed by the...

UPDATE: The source for this sample is now available here . Since this post is closed (it's from Nov 2004), please direct comments to this post . The MDbg sample ships with some interesting extensions, including a simple winforms gui with some very basic...