Platform Changes in 4.0: Debugging

Another change in .Net 4.0 (together with Visual Studio 2010) is an easier debugging experience for investigating production issues in managed applications. One of the frequent challenges of investigating production issues is the need to do the investigation against an offline memory dump rather than a live process. Previously this has required learning how to use windbg or one of the managed debugging extensions such as SOS. These tools are much less friendly than Visual Studio.

For .Net 4.0 applications in Visual Studio 2010 there is additional support for managed and mixed mode debugging from a dump file. Tess Ferrandez has more details about how to use Visual Studio 2010 with dumps. There are some caveats though as heap issues and dumps from earlier framework versions aren’t helped by these new features. However, anyone without a lot of experience doing command-driven debugging will probably find using Visual Studio to be much easier than what was available before.