In this post, we will look at a new feature in Process Explorer, the popular SysInternals tool, which enables developers and IT Pros to collect accurate stack traces for .NET applications.
Adding .NET Stack frames to Process Explorer
A few months ago, a few of us on the .NET Team were looking at how we could improve Process Explorer to provide better diagnostic information for .NET applications. Process Explorer is a very useful tool for investigating why something is going wrong. We know that millions of developers and IT Pros use Process Explorer, so it would seem that even small improvements for .NET would be pretty useful.
After a little conversation, we decided that adding support for .NET frames in Process Explorer’s Stack window would be the most valuable improvement that we could make. We reached out to Mark Russinovich to pitch the idea. For those of you that don’t know, Mark is the creator and maintainer of Process Explorer, and is a Technical Fellow at Microsoft. Mark was immediately supportive of the idea, and gave us the go-ahead to make the changes in the Process Explorer code. That work is now done, and available as part of Process Explorer v15.2 (or later).
What can you do with this new support?
Developers typically reach for Visual Studio when one of their applications starts doing the wrong thing. As the developer of an app, you can reproduce the issue on your own, attach to a badly behaving live repro or look at a dump. You have the source, and can easily go from there. Visual Studio 2012 is great for that scenario.
Sometimes you are a developer working with a customer on their machine and don’t have access to your tools or your application source. You could also be an IT Pro who supports an application that someone else built. In either case, Process Explorer can help you quickly collect diagnostic information, such as call stacks, that can give you an early lead.
Read more: .NET Framework Blog
QR: 