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Managed Stack Explorer

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Check out: Managed Stack Explorer. It's a tool on CodePlex that lets you automatically get stack snapshots of V2 managed processes.

Its debugging inspection functionality (viewing callstacks) is built on the CLR Debugging Services via ICorDebug, and access through managed code via the low-level managed wrappers from Mdbg (and so I've added it to the "Other people's MDbg work" list on the Mdbg linkfest  page). This is like a much fancier version of the Callstack Snapshot tool available. 

I think this is a great example of how debugging services can be useful for writing lightweight, specialized, diagnostic tools beyond just super-powerful debuggers. A big part of our motivation in publishing MDbg (and the managed wrappers) was to make these sort of tools easy to write.

The source is fully available, and you can download it and build it with VS. It currently has a bug where you need to either modify the Main() method or launch it outside of the debugger (Ctrl+F5).

Comments

  • Anonymous
    June 26, 2006
    I wrote a simple tool to take a snapshot of a running managed process and dump the output as an XML file....
  • Anonymous
    June 26, 2006
    A while ago, I wrote a sample tool to gather snapshots of callstacks. After great delay, I've posted...