Tess Ferrandez

Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft. Solving the problems of the world with a debugger, a sprinkle of ML and a bag of chips

less than 1 minute read

Bret wrote a post about Managed Stack Explorer, a really nice tool that was developed in 2006 but since then seems to have been forgotten.

Update 2021: The old download link is gone, but I have found a codeplex link (that will die in June 2021) - and a github repo that updated this to .net 4.0 in 2015

It’s excellent if you want to troubleshoot hangs/performance issues in a process but don’t want to go through the hassle of getting and analyzing a dump. What it will do is basically attach, snap the .net call stack and detach so you can see what all the .net threads are doing without using a debugger.

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What is even cooler is that you can copy/run the tool from anywhere which means that you can copy it to a clients machine if you have a runaway thread in a win forms app for example.

Have a nice weekend, Tess

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