Debugging and Profiling Applications

To debug a .NET Framework application, the compiler and runtime environment must be configured to enable a debugger to attach to the application and to produce both symbols and line maps, if possible, for the application and its corresponding Microsoft intermediate language (MSIL). Once a managed application is debugged, it can be profiled to boost performance. Profiling evaluates and describes the lines of source code that generate the most frequently executed code, and how much time it takes to execute them.

.NET Framework applications are easily debugged using Visual Studio, which handles many of the configuration details. If Visual Studio is not installed, you can examine and improve the performance of .NET Framework applications in several alternative ways, by using the following:

• System.Diagnostics classes.

• Runtime Debugger (Cordbg.exe), which is a command-line debugger.

The .NET Framework namespace System.Diagnostics includes the Trace, Debug, and TraceSource classes for tracing execution flow, and the Process, EventLog, and PerformanceCounter classes for profiling code. The Cordbg.exe command-line debugger can be used to debug managed code from the command-line interpreter.

In This Section

• Debugging and Profiling How-to Topics
  Lists links to How-to topics contained in this section.

• Enabling JIT-attach Debugging
  Shows how to configure the registry to JIT-attach a debug engine to a .NET Framework application.

• Making an Image Easier to Debug
  Shows how to turn JIT tracking on and optimization off to make an assembly easier to debug.

• Enabling Profiling
  Shows how to set environment variables to tie a .NET Framework application to a profiler.

• Tracing and Instrumenting Applications
  Describes how to monitor the execution of your application while it is running, and how to instrument it to display how well it is performing or whether something has gone wrong.

• Diagnosing Errors with Managed Debugging Assistants
  Describes managed debugging assistants (MDAs), which are debugging aids that work in conjunction with the common language runtime (CLR) to provide information on runtime state.

• Enhancing Debugging with the Debugger Display Attributes
  Describes how the developer of a type can specify what that type will look like when it is displayed in a debugger.

Related Sections

• Debugging in Visual Studio
  Describes the integrated debugging functions available in Visual Studio.

• Debugging ASP.NET and AJAX Applications
  Provides prerequisites and instructions for how to debug an ASP.NET application during development or after deployment.

See Also

Other Resources

C# 3.0 in a Nutshell, Third Edition: A Desktop Quick Reference