Clever Geek Handbook

Tools for analyzing and debugging .NET applications

You can look under the hood of the code or look at the internal CLR device using many tools. This post was born out of a tweet , and I have to thank everyone who helped make a list of suitable tools. If I missed any of them, write in the comments.







First, I have to mention that a good debugger is already present in Visual Studio and VSCode . There are also many good (commercial) .NET profilers and application monitoring tools worth looking at. For example, I recently tried working with Codetrack and was impressed with its capabilities.







However, the remaining post is devoted to tools for performing individual tasks , which will help to better understand what is happening. All tools are open source .













PerfView by Vance Morrison



PerfView is a great tool that I have been using for several years. It works on the basis of Windows Event Tracing (ETW) and allows you to better understand what is happening inside the CLR, and also gives the opportunity to get a profile of memory and CPU utilization. To master the tool, you will have to absorb a lot of information, for example with the help of training videos , but it is worth the time and effort.







The tool is so useful that Microsoft engineers themselves use it, and many of the recent performance improvements in MSBuild appeared after analyzing bottlenecks using PerfView.

The tool is based on the Microsoft.Diagnostics.Tracing.TraceEvent library , which you can use to create your own tools. In addition, since the source code of the library is open, thanks to the community, many useful functions have appeared in it, for example, flame-graphs :













SharpLab by Andrey Shcheokin



SharpLab emerged as a tool for checking the IL code generated by the Roslyn compiler, and over time evolved into something more :







SharpLab is an interactive environment for running .NET code that displays intermediate steps and compilation results. Some functions of the language are just wrappers for others, for example using () becomes try / catch. With SharpLab, you will see the code as the compiler sees it and better understand the essence of .NET languages.

The tool supports C #, Visual Basic and F #, but the most interesting functions in it are Decompilation / Disassembly:

The decompilation / disassembly functions can be used to:







  1. C #
  2. Visual basic
  3. IL
  4. JIT Asm (native Asm Code)


You understood correctly: the tool outputs the assembler code that .NET JIT generates from your C # code:













Object Layout Inspector by Sergey Teplyakov



With this tool, you can analyze the structure of .NET objects in memory, i.e. how JITter arranged the fields belonging to your class or structure. This is useful when writing high-performance code. It’s also nice to have a tool that does the hard work for us.







There is no official documentation that describes the field structure, as CLR authors reserve the right to change it in the future. But knowledge of the structure can be useful if you are working on a high-speed application.

How can you study the structure? You can look at raw memory in Visual Studio or use the !dumpobj



in the SOS Debugging Extension . Both approaches require a lot of effort, so we will create a tool that will display the structure of the object at runtime.







According to the example in the GitHub repository, if you use TypeLayout.Print<NotAlignedStruct>()



with similar code: 







 public struct NotAlignedStruct { public byte m_byte1; public int m_int; public byte m_byte2; public short m_short; }


The following output will appear, which will show exactly how the CLR will arrange the struct in memory based on optimization and padding rules. 







 Size: 12. Paddings: 4 (%33 of empty space) |================================| | 0: Byte m_byte1 (1 byte) | |--------------------------------| | 1-3: padding (3 bytes) | |--------------------------------| | 4-7: Int32 m_int (4 bytes) | |--------------------------------| | 8: Byte m_byte2 (1 byte) | |--------------------------------| | 9: padding (1 byte) | |--------------------------------| | 10-11: Int16 m_short (2 bytes) | |================================|


The Ultimate .NET Experiment (TUNE) by Conrad Coconuts



As stated on the GitHub page , TUNE is a promising tool. It will help you learn about the internal structure of .NET and how to improve performance by experimenting with C # code.







Detailed information about him can be found in this post , but at a high level it functions as follows :









It looks like this:













CLR Memory Diagnostics (ClrMD) Tools



Finally, let's take a look at a certain category of tools. Since the release of .NET, developers have always been able to use WinDBG and the SOS Debugging Extension to see what happens in the .NET runtime. However, these are not the easiest tools for a first acquaintance and, as stated in the next tweet, are not always the most productive:









Fortunately, Microsoft made available the ClrMD library (also known as Microsoft.Diagnostics.Runtime ), and now anyone can create a tool for analyzing memory dumps for .NET programs. Detailed information can be found in the official blog . I also recommend taking a look at ClrMD.Extensions , which “... provides integration with LINPad and makes using ClrMD even easier . ”







I wanted to put together a list of all existing tools and called on Twitter for help. Reminding yourself: be careful with tweets. The manager responsible for WinDBG may read them and be upset!









Most of these tools work on the basis of ClrMD, because this is easiest. But if desired, you can use COM interfaces directly . It should also be noted that any ClrMD-based tool is not cross-platform , since ClrMD itself is designed only for Windows. Cross-platform options can be found in Analyzing a .NET Core Core Dump on Linux .







Finally, in order to somehow maintain balance, an improved version of WinDBG recently appeared, which they immediately tried to add functionality:









After all these words, go to the list:









You can find many other tools that use ClrMD . Making it available was a good idea from Microsoft.







Other tools



Other tools worth mentioning:









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