Mark Downie

Principal Program Manager, Visual Studio

Mark Downie is a program manager on the Visual Studio Production Diagnostics team. He blogs about how you can use Visual Studio to get to the bottom of gnarly issues in production.

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Debugging Encoded Text

January 11th, 2023
Validating encoded strings is a basic but important part of our debugging workflow these days. I cannot count the number of times I have found myself looking at a URL-encoded string only to be suddenly unsure how percentage signs are supposed to be represented? I have been a web developer for years, but I can never remember what the URL-...

Arm64 Visual Studio is officially here!

November 8th, 2022
We are happy to announce the first fully supported Arm64 version of Visual Studio that will natively run, allowing building, and debugging Arm64 apps on Arm-based processors. 17.4 GA delivers a native Arm64 experience for Visual Studio that eliminates the need for emulation in most developer workflows. While the improved x64 emulator helps ...

Arm64 Visual Studio

June 14th, 2022
We are excited to announce that the release of Visual Studio 2022 17.3 Preview 2 is now available as a native Arm64 application on Windows 11! This will be the first version of Visual Studio that will natively support building and debugging Arm64 apps on Arm-based processors. Our key goal with this preview is to introduce and stabilize the ...

Managed Memory Dump Analyzers

April 16th, 2021
With the release of Visual Studio 2019 16.9 you can try out our new managed memory dump analyzers to help you root cause the issues that plague your applications in production. We're excited for you to give it a try!

Cross Platform Managed Memory Dump Debugging

October 8th, 2020
With the release of Visual Studio 16.8 Preview 3 you now have the ability to open and analyze managed dumps collected on Linux and use the best in class debugging tools available in Visual Studio.

Disassembly improvements for optimized managed debugging

September 14th, 2020
If you are focused on squeezing out the last bits of performance for your .NET service or application, you might choose to take advantage of JIT compiler optimizations. However, debugging optimized code can be a challenge. In this blog I’ll show you how the Disassembly Window can help you debug optimized code.

Viewing Managed COM Objects Through Native Pointers

July 15th, 2020
If you are a developer who is curating a successful .NET project using COM interop, then our latest preview of Visual Studio is for you (Download 16.7 Preview 3). This feature automatically decodes managed COM objects referenced by native pointers allowing you to fully inspect values in the Locals window.

Decompilation of C# code made easy with Visual Studio

February 13th, 2020
Have you ever experienced an exception occurring in a 3rd party .NET assembly but had no source code to figure out why? You can now use Visual Studio to decompile managed code even if you don't have the symbols, allowing you to look at code, inspect variables and set breakpoints.

Find solutions faster by analyzing crash dumps in Visual Studio

August 19th, 2019
When unexpected crashes occur in your managed application you are often left with little evidence of the issue; capturing and analyzing memory dumps may be your last best option. Thankfully Visual Studio is a great tool for analyzing your apps memory dumps! In this post we show you how easy it can be to resolve the issue using Visual Studio.

Resolve code issues in live apps running in Azure Kubernetes Services with the Snapshot Debugger

July 15th, 2019
Snapshot Debugger is built for production so you can set Snappoints and Logpoints in code, like debugger breakpoints and tracepoints. However, when a Snappoint is hit in an AKS Linux Docker container, a snapshot is dynamically created without stopping the process. You are then able to attach to these snapshots using Visual Studio.

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