Most of us have been there: you’ve written a fantastic application that performs perfectly in your Development and/or QA environments, but in Production something goes wrong. Your application spins out of control, utilizing 100% of your CPU. Maybe it simply stops responding as if it were deadlocked. Or maybe it simply crashes randomly. What now?

Logic tells you that you have a problem in the code somewhere that is only encountered in a Production-like environment… and if you could JUST get into the Production box, install Visual Studio (or at least the Remote Debugger), and debug the application, you’d be able to solve the problem. However, you can’t (because it’s Production!), and you can’t replicate the problem in any other environment. Maybe it’s because of stale Development or QA environment data compared to live Production data. Maybe it’s something else. You have no idea where to look to find and fix the problem in your application. For lack of eloquence: you’re screwed.

Sorry for the delay in posts, May has been a very busy month.

In order to accurately debug or profile an external assembly or library (AKA one you’re not directly compiling), you need the associated PDB files to accompany each of the DLLs. These files give the debugger some information about the compiled assembly so that your debugger or profiler can become aware of function names, line numbers, and other related meta data.