Track 3 | 11:25
Sasha will be the first to admit that he has a love-hate, passive-aggressive relationship with WinDbg. If you feel that way too, this talk will help turn WinDbg into your best ally. Even in 2016, there’s still room for this powerful, lightweight debugger than you can plug into any production environment as easily as into a development system. Sasha along with participants will examine several areas in which WinDbg can give you superpowers. First, he’ll talk about WinDbg scripts and extensions that help automate boring, tedious debugging tasks – think setting a bunch of breakpoints, aggregating variable values whenever a breakpoint is hit, or searching for a specific value in a large collection. You don’t have to learn WinDbg’s horrible scripting language if you don’t want to; there are available alternatives, such as PyKD. Next, Sasha will discuss some obscure WinDbg extensions that can perform x64 stack reconstruction, print out all currently executing ASP.NET requests, and run LINQ-like queries over objects on the .NET heap. Finally, there will be a talk about some of the debugger’s core features that make it so flexible and powerful: seamless remote debugging with no authentication and domain accounts, setting up a post-mortem or pre-startup debugger, and sharing a debugging session between multiple developers — for a post-modern group debugging future!
Sasha Goldshtein goldshtn
Sela Group
Sasha Goldshtein is the CTO of Sela Group, a Microsoft C# MVP and Azure MRS, a Pluralsight author, and an international consultant and trainer. Sasha is the author of "Introducing Windows 7 for Developers" (Microsoft Press, 2009) and "Pro .NET Performance" (Apress, 2012), a prolific blogger and open source contributor, and the author of numerous training courses including .NET Debugging, .NET Performance, Android Application Development, and Modern C++. His consulting work revolves mainly around distributed architecture, production debugging and performance diagnostics, and mobile application development.