In this lab, you will build a simple application that traverses a directory full of crash dumps and performs automatic analysis that detects the exception and call stack of the faulting thread. This can serve as a foundation for a complete diagnostic solution that uses this information to automatically assign bugs, email developers, or aggregate information on failure types encountered at specific client sites.
Create a new C# console application in Visual Studio. Add the Microsoft.Diagnostics.Runtime NuGet package. Make sure the application builds successfully.
Note: Due to the fact that the unmanaged mscordacwks.dll library needs to be loaded into the analysis process, you will need a 32-bit (x86) build of this application to analyze 32-bit dump files and a 64-bit (x64) build to analyze 64-bit dump files.
Accept a directory name as a command-line argument and traverse all the .dmp files in that directory (use Directory.GetFiles or a similar API). For each dump file, use the following code to create a CLRMD ClrRuntime object that can be used for inspecting threads:
DataTarget target = DataTarget.LoadCrashDump(filename, CrashDumpReader.ClrMD);
ClrRuntime runtime = target.ClrVersions[0].CreateRuntime();Use the ClrRuntime.Threads property to enumerate all the managed threads, and identify the ClrThread whose CurrentException property is not null. This is likely the thread that caused the application to crash.
There are some situations when the
CurrentExceptionproperty will be set even though there is no current exception being thrown on the thread. You can ignore them for now.
After detecting the ClrThread object that has an active exception, print out the exception type and exception message, and the thread's call stack (use ClrThread.StackTrace).
Test your application by placing a few dump files in a directory and running it with the name of that directory as a command-line argument. You can use the dump files generated in the WER Dumps lab.