Advanced .NET Debugging

If you are looking for "deep diving" in ocean named ".Net" this is the book. I started reading this book and had couple of queries which I thought of asking author. I got replies to both of my queries within 3 hrs period, yes 3 hrs. I have never seen such dedication by any author to their reader. I wish Mario will help development community by offering more such books in future.

Advanced .NET Debugging is a great book and a valuable addition to any dedicated .NET developer's toolbox. Not only does it cover the highly useful Debugging Tools for Windows package (the book uses ntsd for all examples, but everything applies to WinDbg as well) and how to debug hard-to-solve problems. It also provides a lot of details on how the .NET runtime works internally. It is well written, easy to read, and full of useful gems. My only complaint is that the examples use debug builds, which may give a somewhat misleading view on how to go about troubleshooting problems in real world applications as release mode builds will usually not have the same amount of details available. However, it still comes highly recommended. Brian Rasmussen Microsoft MVP Visual C#

If you program for the .NET framework you *need* this book. It helps to take your debugging skills (as well as understanding of the platform) to the next level. How many times in the past have we tried to nail down a particularly tricky bug, and after hours (or days) of pulling at your hair, given up in despair and doubted our worth as a good programmer ? Well, if you have trodden down that path, then I am sure this book will help. I wish to warn you that this is not a book for a beginner nor for the faint-hearted. It will show you the tools, it will show you the way, but you will have to walk that path which begins by buying this book and reading it. If you already have Advanced Windows Debugging by the same author and have read it, then you should be in good shape to tackle this one. But if you haven't, fear not, you can still make it. The book is soft-bound, neatly printed in about 500 pages and contains 10 chapters divided into 3 parts. It doesn't weight much and can be easily carried around. Part 1 consists of 3 chapters. In the first chapter the reader is an introduction to the tools. The 2nd chapter - CLR fundamentals - contrary to its name, is not a high level overview for the newbie. Instead it is a wealth of information for all .NET programmers. No matter how senior a programmer you are, I will bet that you will still learn something (probably a lot) from this chapter. The 3rd chapter - Basic Debugging Tasks - is a bit lengthy (I don't mean that in a bad way) at about 100 pages, helps you get acquainted with the tools and commands. Part 2 consists of 4 chapters - Assembly Loader, Managed Heap and Garbage Collection, Synchronization and Interoperability. As you might guess from the names, it is pretty advanced. It is hard, but you will emerge with a much better and clearer understanding of the platform. The chapter on interoperability might not be useful for everybody, but for those who have felt the pain of COM interop or PInvoke this chapter pays for the price of the book many times over. Part 3 consists of the advanced-advanced topics. There is a chapter named Postmortem debugging which includes debugging problems when you have no access to the live machine and you cannot reproduce the problem locally. It consists of taking a dump file and analyzing it offsite. Not an everyday topic for most programmers, but you will surely be thankful for this chapter if you ever come across it. It also explains how the Windows error reporting works. The second last chapter is called PowerTools which includes discussion of PowerDbg which allows you to control native debuggers using powershell (how cool is that !). There is also information on Visual Studio integration with SOS and on CLR Profiler. The last chapter, a small one at about 15 pages, is on .NET 4.0 (based on Beta 1 release though). The writing style is very clear and precise. There are plenty of samples and some good diagrams to help your understand the concepts better (i loved the

I've just started reading this book (see my notes on Software Generalist blog) and this review is written from the perspective of an unmanaged and native software engineer (the last phrase sounds funny). Being a member of a software support of a large software company I analyze crash dumps that have mscorwks.dll on their stack traces. So if you see them too this book helps you to understand what this DLL is all about and how to dig inside the hidden world of .Net it manages. I'm on page 26 and will update this review as soon as I finish the book in a few months. Please also see my review of the previous Mario's (co-authored with Daniel Pravat) book: Advanced Windows Debugging. It is of great importance to know .NET world for Windows maintenance engineers and I originally planned a similar book Unmanaged Code: Escaping the Matrix of .NET but didn't have time to finish :-) Dmitry Vostokov Software Defect Researcher Founder of Crash Dump Analysis Portal Editor-in-Chief of Debugged! MZ/PE magazine The author of Windows Debugging: Practical Foundations and x64 Windows Debugging: Practical Foundations

As one of the official reviewers of this book I think this is the deepest .NET debugging book I'm aware of. It teaches how to use WinDbg and other troubleshooting tools to diagnose problems like hangs, crashes and memory leaks coming from .NET applications. The cool thing here is that these techniques are the same techniques used by folks from Microsoft Support!