Posts by Year

2023

Naming tests

7 minute read

I’m a sucker for clean, minimalistic code, that is easy to read, understand and maintain.

Organizing ASP.NET Core Minimal APIs

4 minute read

I often hear (on social media or direct comments) people saying you can’t use minimal APIs for “real production” apps.

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2021

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2011

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2010

Debug Diag 1.2 (Beta)

1 minute read

Are you looking for some good stuff to put in your family’s Christmas stockings this year? Maybe a new phone, a controller for your gaming console, why not a...

IIS and PAE

2 minute read

I recently got a question by one of my customers about PAE and IIS that I thought I’d share the answer to.

New debugger extension for .NET (PSSCOR2)

1 minute read

Tom just blogged about a new debugger extension called PSSCor2, which is a superset to the SOS.dll extension that ships with the .net framework.

New commands in SOS for .NET 4.0 Part 1

4 minute read

My friend and fellow debugger Brian at http://Kodehoved.dk recently wrote a couple of posts on news with sos for .NET framework 4.0 (in Danish)

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2009

Recap of Oredev and some .net debugging videos

1 minute read

This week I attended and spoke at the Oredev conference in Malmö Sweden, and it was great fun as usual. It was a pretty productive few days with a lot of goo...

WOHOO!!!, Debug Diag 64bit is finally released

less than 1 minute read

For all of you who have been asking me if there is a 64bit version of Debug Diag (used to debug 64 bit processes), I am happy to say that yes, Debug Diag 1.1...

ASP.NET Case Study: Hang when loading assemblies

5 minute read

The other day I came across an issue where an ASP.NET site stopped responding and didn’t start serving requests again until the W3WP.exe process was restarte...

Design tips for Developers

1 minute read

I found a set of really nice, short videos by Arturo Toledo on the Silverlight blog that I thought were worth sharing.

Background Garbage Collection in CLR 4.0

2 minute read

Yesterday I found this really nice Channel 9 interview with Maoni Stephens (Dev Owner of the CLR GC) and Andrew Pardoe (Program manager for the CLR GC) where...

Debugging a .NET crash with rules in Debug Diag

7 minute read

During mine and Micke’s presentation at TechDays this week I showed a demo of setting up rules with Debug Diag to identify the cause of a crash in an ASP.NET...

.NET Rocks: Debugging chat

less than 1 minute read

Yesterday I had a nice chat with Richard and Carl at .NET Rocks. We talked about .net, debugging, memory issues and a bunch of other stuff, and in the end I ...

TechDays Sweden March 17th-18th 2009

less than 1 minute read

If you live in Sweden and haven’t signed up for TechDays 2009 yet, go ahead and check it out. There are a lot of good speakers scheduled for the conference.

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2008

Performance by Design – PDC 2008

less than 1 minute read

Rico Mariani (Chief Architect of Visual Studio – previously performance architect for .net), Vance Morrison (Performance architect for .net) and Mark Friedma...

CLR Inside Out: Large Object Heap Uncovered

less than 1 minute read

In many of my posts I have discussed performance issues and memory issues caused by excessive use of the Large Object Heap, here are a few examples.

The 21 most popular blog posts

1 minute read

I started this blog 2.5 years ago today, mostly because I felt that the same types of issues came up over and over and over in our support cases. I figured t...

ASP.NET Hang: Authenticode signed assemblies

4 minute read

When you use authenticode signed assemblies in an application, the application needs to go out and check the certificate revocation lists (CRLs) to verify th...

Setting breakpoints in .net code using !bpmd

3 minute read

From time to time I get questions like our process spawns a lot of threads, how do we know who created them? or can I tell how many times we call this method...

ASP.NET Case Study: Hang with mixed-mode dlls

8 minute read

If you use mixed mode dlls (assemblies with .net and c++ code) you need to take care to not have any .net entry points so that you don’t end up with a GC/Loa...

.NET Debugging Demos Lab 7: Memory Leak

4 minute read

This is the last debugging lab in the .NET Debugging Labs series. By now you should have the basics down for troubleshooting hangs, perf issues, memory leaks...

.NET Debugging Demos Lab 6: Memory Leak

6 minute read

It’s been about a week since I posted the debugging challenge for this lab, things have been a bit busy lately so sorry about the tardiness on posting the l...

.NET Debugging Demos Lab 5: Crash

4 minute read

Last week I published a debugging challenge for Lab 5. It was really interesting to see the results and I have to say I was really happy to see the excellen...

Silverlight 2 Beta 1 and Expression Blend

2 minute read

ScottGu has outdone himself again with a demo series First Look at Silverlight 2 and First Look at using Expression Blend with Silverlight 2.

When a mommy and a daddy love each other…

less than 1 minute read

It’s been a long time since I posted anything in the bag of chips category but man, this book really made me laugh :) Why read stories to your kids about Cin...

Hang caused by GC - XML Deadlock

13 minute read

In December I blogged about a little tool that I wrote to analyze hangs in dumps, and i showed the following output, but didn’t really get into the details o...

.NET Debugging Demos Lab 2: Crash

3 minute read

It was nice to see that so many people downloaded the demo site already and checked out the lab instructions for the first lab.

.NET Debugging Demos Lab 1: Hang

3 minute read

This is the first in a series of about 10 labs on .NET debugging. The lab will use a site called BuggyBits, and as the name suggests the bits are extremely b...

Learning .NET debugging

3 minute read

I often get questions like How do I learn .net debugging? What books should I read? Where can I find more information?

Using WinDbg - Advanced commands

5 minute read

Update 2021: This is a re-post of a post from Johan Straarup - I am posting it here as his blog has been decommissioned

ASP.NET hang/slowness on startup

5 minute read

After making some changes to their domains one of my customers noticed that their ASP.NET 2.0 applications didn’t respond anymore. HTML pages and images were...

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2007

Automated .NET Hang Analysis

5 minute read

In my constant effort to make my job obsolete, I have created an “add-in” for windbg that automatically checks for hang conditions in a .NET memory dump.

Getting started with windbg - part II

13 minute read

Update 2021: This is a re-post of a post from Johan Straarup - I am posting it here as his blog has been decommissioned

ASP.NET Memory Investigation

12 minute read

This is a bit of a continuation of ASP.NET Memory Issue: High memory usage in a 64bit w3wp.exe process so if you haven’t checked it out you might want to jus...

A Case of Invalid ViewState

5 minute read

Last week I was helping a colleague of mine with a ViewState case that turned out to be pretty interesting…

WinDBG Scripts

2 minute read

I see post-mortem debugging as:

Swedish .NET Debugging PodCast

less than 1 minute read

I know most of you probably don’t know Swedish, but for those of you who do, here is a link to a podcast where Dag König is interviewing me about .NET issues...

.NET Garbage Collection PopQuiz - Answers

12 minute read

It was really exciting to see that so many people answered the .NET GC PopQuiz, especially seeing that so many had great answers. Perhaps the questions were ...

.NET Garbage Collection PopQuiz

1 minute read

Time for a little pop-quiz/potential interview questions to get some action going in the comments section…

Developer Summit 2007

less than 1 minute read

A short commercial break… I’ll be talking about debugging ASP.NET issues at Developer Summit 2007 in Stockholm on May 23rd.

I’ve been Tagged

1 minute read

I was Tagged by David Salgado so here are 5 things you probably don’t know about me…

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2006

.NET Hang Debugging Walkthrough

8 minute read

I have talked about a number of different hang/performance issues in my posts. This post is a generic debugging walk through for hangs. It applies to all t...

My Blog posts in Chinese

less than 1 minute read

Courtesy of Ring some of my blog posts are now available in Chinese. Thank you much Ring for taking the time to translate…

ASP.NET Crash - Crazy looping in a SiteMap

6 minute read

It’s been a while again. Lots of prepping for the debugging workshops and a bit of re-modeling done to the house but now it’s time to write again…

.NET Memory usage - A restaurant analogy

8 minute read

My favorite author Simon Singh is a wiz at analogies. In his book The big bang he explains concepts like the doppler effect and the theory of relativity usin...

.Net memory leak: Unblock my finalizer

17 minute read

This time I figured I’d talk about an issue that spans all three debugging scenarios, hangs, memory issues and crashes… yummy :)

Contacting Tess

less than 1 minute read

I have been receiving a lot of email lately asking for help on particular issues.

Request for feedback

less than 1 minute read

Not sure if anyone is reading this blog, but if you are and there is something specific you want me to blog about please let me know.

A Hang Scenario, Locks and Critical Sections

10 minute read

The situation here is that the server at times slows down considerably, or even hangs completely. Requests start timing out and no new requests seem to be ge...

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2005

Things to ignore when debugging an ASP.NET hang

7 minute read

When looking at a dump, a lot of the art of debugging (I like to call it an art because it makes me feel more important:)) is knowing what you can ignore so ...

Associate windbg with .dmp files

1 minute read

If you get tired of starting the debugger, loading your dump, setting up your sympath, loading your extensions, etc. etc. here is a nifty way of getting “Deb...

What on earth caused my process to crash?

9 minute read

So you got a 1000 w3wp.exe stopped unexpectedly in the event viewer or your process just exited in some weird undefined way and you don’t know why.

Why I love the debugger

3 minute read

10 years ago, still in college, I started working for a company developing real-time systems for trains in Motorola HC11 assembly. Although very interesting ...

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