Your debugging experience - I want to hear from you

DotNetKicks.com — Fri, 16 May 2008 06:28:30 GMT

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re: Your debugging experience - I want to hear from you

Sean Patterson — Fri, 16 May 2008 19:55:07 GMT

Greetings Tom,

I've been following your blog a little bit now and in a lot of ways, I run a completely different gamut for my ASP.NET debugging.

I got hooked on log4net a while back. I love the infrastructure it provides and by default, all my web apps are configured to log any caught and unhandled exceptions by dumping the exception into the log.

By doing things this way, I can have a user friendly message displayed to the end user when something goes wrong, but still have a full dump of the stack trace for debugging purposes.

Since I don't always have access to the server itself, I wrote a little web application (actually in CodePlex - http://www.codeplex.com/hacksaw) that will allow me to view the log entries. I pull up the log and find the error in question.

Fortunately in my environment, 9 times out of 10, it winds up being a pretty simple error like a missing file or a missing parameter, which the end user can use the application to update.

If things are worse than that, I simply modify the log4net configuration to go into DEBUG mode, which I have coded to dump additional information, such as start/end of methods, parameters passed in, and the like.

After that point, I'll turn on the ASPNET tracer (which will also display the log4net items as well) and see if that opens up any doors.

The final step for me comes to jumping back into my development machine and stepping through the debugger at the points of interest. Fortunately I haven't had to do this too many times, but I don't believe I'm running any of the high end stuff you're doing around here.

Heck, I'm still learning about sos.dll and all those tricks, hence the reason I'm following this blog 8^D Keep up the great work!

re: Your debugging experience - I want to hear from you

Tom — Fri, 16 May 2008 21:04:27 GMT

Sean,

Thanks for the comment. That is some really great information and that is exactly what I am looking for. I am trying to figure out the best way to create something that can be used by everyone. I also want to see what we can do to help without the need for dumps so this is great information.