A while ago, an internal thread shows how to get where the exception is thrown in Windows Error Report for managed application without a dump. The thread is very insightful. Shared below: Subject: RE: How to investigate Windows Error Report from managed...

Internal manifest is the RT_MANIFEST resource in the executable. External manifest is App.exe.manifest. In Windows XP, Sxs searches external manifest before internal manifest. If an external manifest is found, the internal manifest is ignored. In Windows...

CLR HRESULT’ facility code is 0x13. If an HRESULT error is 0x8013xxxx, it is likely a CLR error. All CLR errors are defined in CorError.h. You can find CorError.h in your Visual Studio install (or Microsoft Platform SDK). C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs...

The following is a common code pattern Resource resource = GetResource(); DoWork(); return resource; If DoWork() throws exception, the resource will be leaked. We need to guard against this. For example bool success = false ; Resource resource = GetResource...

C# does not support exception filter. However, VB and IL support it. To add exception filter to C#, we can build a function in VB or IL, then call it in C#. The example below is one way we may implement the function to support exception filter. It asks...

I mentioned that we can use ThreadPool.BindHandle to implement asynchronous IO. Here are roughly the steps necessary to make it happen: 1. Create an overlapped file handle SafeFileHandle handle = CreateFile( filename, Win32.GENERIC_READ_ACCESS, Win32...

CLR’s thread pool has two pools of threads. The first pool is used by ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem . The second pool is an IoCompletionPort thread pool used by ThreadPool.BindHandle and ThreadPool.UnsafeQueueNativeOverlapped . ThreadPool.BindHandle is...

We can convert a char * to System.String with System.String’s constructor string str = new string((char*)p); And for the reverse: fixed(char *p = str){} Why do we care about conversion between System.String and char *? From this article , this is the...

If you have used your Vista SP1-based computer for extended period, you may experience some problems starting large applications, for example, Office 2007 applications. Specifically, you may receive a message “XXX is not a valid Win32 application”. If...

The following is a conversation between me and a CLR dev. The conversation is very informative so I quote it here. From: Sent: To: Subject: RE: ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem There might be some confusion here around the meaning of the term "I/O Thread...

From .Net Framework 2.0, Dr. Watson is able to generate dump compatible with .Net framework. This means, dumps with heap data generated by Dr. Watson contains information about managed heap so they can be analyzed with sos.dll. Some update to Dr.Watson...

64 bit Windows can run both 32 bit process and 64 bit process. For debugging though, you want to use 32 bit debugger to debug 32 bit process, and 64 bit debugger for 64 bit process. Otherwise it won’t be pretty. Occasionally, I receive a 32 bit process...

To diagnose a problem for a remote customer, sometimes the easiest way is to have the customer generate a full memory dump for the process, and share the memory dump. In Vista, task manager can generate a full memory dump from the Processes tab. In Windows...

On our stress run, we saw our process’ handle count steadily increases until certain point, then it stabilizes. However the number of handles is high. Most of those handles are Event handles. We are concerned about it. So we went off and did some investigation...

Windbg Debugger’s !htrace extension is very handy to debug handle leak. The process essentially boils down to the following simple steps: 1. Enable trace 2. Take a snapshot 3. Run scenario 4. Show the diff On step 4, !htrace will show all the extra opened...

C# provides keyword lock for synchronized access. A good practice is to create a private object for locking purpose. For example, public class LockExample { private object syncObject = new object (); public void SynchronizedMethod() { lock (syncObject...

We are seeing a NullReferenceException in our stress program. The investigation process may be helpful to some folks. Thread 22 is showing a Watson dialog. This is a register corruption. 0:022> kp ChildEBP RetAddr 091bc9a0 76961220 ntdll!ZwWaitForSingleObject...

The root element for Application config file is <configuration> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <configuration > </configuration> The application config file is shared with CLR and Windows SxS. SxS dictates...

When debug a memory dump, the dump may not in the right exception context when it is first loaded in the debugger. However, we can figure out the right context from the dump. Let's load the dump. c:\debuggers>cdb -z c:\temp\foo.dmp Symbol search path...

Sos.dll does not have a command to tell the size of each GC generation. However, you can calculate the size based on the output of !eeheap -gc. For example, 0:000> !eeheap -gc Number of GC Heaps: 1 generation 0 starts at 0x1da6c430 generation 1 starts...

when debugging a managed memory dump, we can use Sos.dll to inspect managed objects inside the dump. for example, we can do !dumpheap to list the managed objects in GC Heap, we can also use !gcroot to figure out the reference path to a particular object...

The other day my Windows XP machine suddenly can not use Windows Update. Internet Explorer went to the Windows Update web site, but stucked in loading the ActiveX control. Nothing is shown, and no progress is made. After I clicked the Microsoft Update...

Windows Performance Team has released Windows Performance Tools Kit to the Windows SDK for Windows Server 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5. http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/sysperf/perftools.mspx This is the same tool Windows team uses to diagnose Windows...

P/Invoke is managed code executing a native function pointer. And Reverse P/Invoke is native code executing a managed delegate as a function pointer, mostly as a callback. When the native code executes the managed delegate function pointer, the call really...

I was always wondering what is happening between an application throws an unhandled exception, and a debugger attached to the process. Apparently the information is right under my nose, but I was blind. Windows Debugger's documentation about post-mortem...