More debugging videos and a Resource List from my TechED and Oredev sessions on debugging asp.net applications
I just returned from Oredev and TechED EMEA, both conferences were very interesting in their own special ways.
TechED was of course bigger with a lot of good sessions on my specific area while Oredev is a bit more small and cozy, and a way to meet people that deal with completely different things than I do, like JRuby, Clojure, UI Design what have you… and I guess to some extent to get a reality check and see what the world looks like outside of my .net bubble:)
Windows Crash Dump Analysis with Daniel Pearson
In particular I really enjoyed Daniel Pearson’s session on Windows Crash Dump Analysis where he discussed how to debug BSODs (blue-screens). He said something interesting that really struck a chord with me.
“You should be happy when you get a Blue Screen because that is Windows way of protecting you from drivers corrupting data on your system”
A couple of outtakes from this… If you get a BSOD, don’t just dismiss it. It contains a lot of juicy info like stop codes (telling you why it crashed) and oftentimes the driver that made it crash (because 95% of the time it’s a driver or problematic hardware causing the problem by trying to do or access something it shouldn’t)
All sessions by Mark Russinovich
It goes without saying, Mark Russinovich is the king of interesting presentations. Whenever I go to a “case of the unexpected” session I come out with some tool that I can use immediately to resolve perf. issues or other annoyances on my personal machines. I am sure that a lot of you have already seen these but if you haven’t, here are a few of his sessions
Updated 2021
- Case of the Unexplained 2014
- Case of the Unexplained 2013
- Case of the Unexplained 2012
- Case of the Unexplained 2011
- Case of the Unexplained 2010
While speaking of Mark, check out the autoruns app to clean up your machine from apps that are launched at start up to speed up startup on your machines. And, of course, as Mark says “When in doubt, use process explorer” :)
Resources for my sessions
For the 2nd year in a row I presented a session about debugging ASP.NET issues with WinDBG and sprinkled in some demos of new mixed-mode dump debugging in Visual Studio .NET 2010.
If you went to see it, first off thank you:) and second, here are links to some of the tools I used.
- Debugging Tools for Windows (Includes Windbg)
- Debug Diag 1.1 – Great tool for creating memory dumps and analyzing them
- Post on using .CmdTree to get a Treview list with commands
- My Debug Diag script for analyzing .net memory leaks
- IIS Resource Kit (contains tinyget to do quick and dirty stress tests)
Podcasts, webcasts and interviews
As I mentioned in my last post, I had a chance to record some webcasts with Carl Franklin of DNRTV and a podcast with Scott Hanselman for Hanselminutes
- DotNetRocks TV – 30 minute webcast with demos on .net debugging
- Channel 9 with Hanselman – 10-15 min webcast with a demo on how to debug dumps with Visual Studio .NET 2010
- Hanselminutes – 30 minute podcast about .net debugging
I also had a chance to record some TechED TechTalk Interviews last week (where I was the interviewer:)).
- TechTalk about MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework) with Magnus Mårtensson from dotway
- TechTalk about Parallel Computing with Tiberiu Covaci
Tibi was on the road with us at Oredev and TechED and I think he is at the PDC now as well, doing 5 minute interviews with lots of people, like Jon Flanders, Scott Hanselman (again), Julie Lerman, Scott Allen etc. etc. and last but not least a really cool 5 min interview with Ze Frank that ended up lasting 11 minutes :)
Have a good one, Tess
