I recently got an email with the following question: “Can you give me some very helpful hints with this one ? I am struggling with the following error in an asp.net application. Exception Message: Internal Error : Unable to load DLL 'RdbNet.dll': A dynamic link library (DLL) initialization routine failed. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x8007045A) The RdbNet.dll is an .NET dll from Oracle so I can't debug into it. If I use a windows forms application I never have the error. I have already used procmon...

A colleague of mine, John Allen, created an awesome tool way back that displays memory usage in a process very nicely. I use screenshots from it from time to time in presentations or posts but unfortunately that tool is not publicly available. Since lots of people have asked me about it I figured I would just do a quick and dirty mock-up (based on the same ideas) and post the VS solution here. This sample tool will give you a visual overview of the virtual memory space (from a memory dump)...

Since a .net exception is a .NET object like any other, it gets stored on the GC heap when you (or some code you call) calls new XXException().  This means that if you have a memory dump of a process you can dump out all the recent exceptions that have occurred, or rather all exceptions that have not yet been garbage collected, which will give you a good feel for what exceptions occurred recently.  Doing this is pretty easy if you have sos loaded (.loadby sos mscorwks) in windbg 0:015>...

After installing .NET 3.5 SP1 you may get Validation of viewstate MAC failed exceptions when doing post backs on ASP.NET pages Validation of viewstate MAC failed. If this application is hosted by a Web Farm or cluster, ensure that <machineKey> configuration specifies the same validationKey and validation algorithm. AutoGenerate cannot be used in a cluster. Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information...

A few weeks back me and Micke (one of our Architect Evangelists) had a session at TechDays where we talked about “things that looked good on paper” i.e. things that sound pretty ok in the design/development phase but sometimes turn out to be a disaster in production. We are both pretty passionate about making the lives of the ops. people easier by thinking about the maintenance of the sites/apps at design time, rather than having it be an afterthought.  I stole the title of this post from one...