In this post I would like to describe my recent experience of troubleshooting a slow-starting systemd unit implemented in .NET. While Linux troubleshooting is still new territory for me, I am gradually learning new tools and techniques. I wanted to share some of my discoveries in the hope that you will find them interesting 😊 [ ]
I host my research/test Windows VMs on Linux, using Samba to share files between systems. One day, while debugging a problem in WinDbg, the debugger froze on loading symbols for combase.dll. I knew that combase.pdb is a big file (contains private symbols), but usually downloading it was not that slow. To make things worse, when [ ]
A few weeks ago I published Detours.Win32Metadata Nuget package containing a Win32 metadata for the detours library. When you combine it with CsWin32, you may easily generate PInvoke signatures for functions exported by the Detours library. Adding NativeAOT compilation, we are ready to implement a native function hook in C# and activate it in a [ ]
When we need to change the PE file imports, we might either modify the binary file in the file system or perform updates after it has been loaded to the memory. In this post, I will focus on the latter approach, showing you moments in the process lifetime when such changes are possible. We will [ ]
When writing system applications in C# we often need to interact with the system APIs directly. And it has always been a challenge to write proper PInvoke signatures. However, with the introduction of the Windows metadata project and later, cswin32, things changed significantly. In this post, I will walk you through the steps required to [ ]
A few months ago, I switched my main desktop to Manjaro, and I m glad about it. Manjaro Linux is a polished and well-designed Linux distribution. As I like simplicity and a minimalistic approach, I chose the XFCE Desktop edition. Switching to Linux did not make me abandon the Windows platform completely. I spend lots of [ ]
More than ten years ago (how time flies!), when I published the basic sample of a COM+ server and client, I thought that I wouldn t be touching this subject again. But here we are, in 2022, and I have so much interaction with COM at work that I decided to write a new, updated, and [ ]
I made several updates to my open-source tools in the last four weeks, and I also released one new tool. In this post, I will describe those updates briefly, including some discoveries I made along the way. dotnet-wtrace The biggest news is the release of dotnet-wtrace, a new tool in the wtrace toolkit. I created [ ]
Last week we published the final module of the .NET Diagnostics Expert Course: I m excited and happy that it s finally available. But I m also relieved as there were times when I thought it would never happen 🙂 In this post, I want to share some details about the course and why I decided to make [ ]
While playing with EventPipes, I wanted to better understand the Diagnostic IPC Protocol. This protocol is used to transfer diagnostic data between the .NET runtime and a diagnostic client, such as, for example, dotnet-trace. When a .NET process starts, the runtime creates the diagnostic endpoint. On Windows, the endpoint is a named pipe, and on [ ]