February 19, 2006

MiniDumps are now available for managed and mixed-mode assemblies!

One of the main drawbacks of mixed-mode assemblies, was the inability to create minidumps if an exception occurs. In pure managed apps this is not really a problem, because the callstack can be logged in a textfile. But if you have mixed-mode assemblies, you can only see the managed callstack and there was no way to see the unmanged part.

For .NET 1.1 the only solution was to create a full-memory-dump. But this is not a practical solution if the problem occurs on the customer side; it is hard to transfer 20-80 MBs…

For .NET 2.0 and the actual dbghelp.dll (6.6.3.5; which is a beta-version) it is possible to create really minidumps! If you have the dmp-file and you load it into windbg, then you only need to load the sos.dll for the .NET 2.0 runtime and then you also can display the managed callstack (or via !analyze -v)

This is really a big improvement in mixed-mode debugging!


Posted 1 year, 10 months ago on February 19, 2006
The trackback url for this post is http://blog.kalmbachnet.de/bblog/trackback.php/74/

Re: MiniDumps are now available for managed and mixed-mode assemblies!
This is a very interesting blog, congrats. Keep updating it with more info. Btw, you can always add a 'Links to other blogs' link :) (if you know any similar other blogs on Win32 and .NET ). thanks
Posted 1 year, 10 months ago by Me • • • Reply
Comment Trackback URL : http://blog.kalmbachnet.de/bblog/trackback.php/74/386/

Comments have now been turned off for this post