Mark Downie

Senior 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.

Post by this author

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.

Introducing Time Travel Debugging for Visual Studio Enterprise 2019

April 3rd, 2019
The Time Travel Debugging (TTD) preview in Visual Studio Enterprise 2019 provides the ability to record a Web app running on a Azure Virtual Machine (VM) and then accurately reconstruct and replay the execution path. TTD integrates with our Snapshot Debugger offering and allows you to rewind and replay each line of code however many times you want, helping you isolate and identify problems that might only occur in production environments.

Debug your live apps running in Azure Virtual Machines and Azure Kubernetes

January 29th, 2019
We are excited to announce that in Visual Studio Enterprise 2019 we are expanding Snapshot Debugger support beyond Azure App Services hosting ASP.NET Core and ASP.NET applications to also include Azure Virtual Machines (VM), Azure Virtual Machine scale sets (VMSS) and Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS).

Feedback usabilla icon