April 6th, 2023

Visual Studio Toolbox: Debug Threads & Tasks with Parallel Stacks

Leslie Richardson
Program Manager

The Visual Studio Toolbox show helps you become a more productive developer by focusing on tooling in and out of Visual Studio.  Our latest episodes of VS Toolbox (available both on Learn and YouTube) feature Mark Downie and Ramkumar Ramesh from the Visual Studio Diagnostics team. They demonstrate how you can use the Threads and Tasks views of the Parallel Stacks window in VS 2022 to debug your multithreaded applications.

 

When debugging multithreaded applications, understanding the relationship between threads is important for properly designating and negotiating resources between them.  In the Debugging Threads with the Parallel Stacks Window episode, Mark and Ram use a demo app containing deadlocked threads. They show how you can use the Parallel Stacks window to see a visual representation of all the threads in a process. This can help you find out where and why the deadlock has occurred.

 

The async/await programming model is used by lots of developers, who use it to unlock the benefits of parallel programming. In the Debugging Tasks with the Parallel Stacks Window episode, Mark and Ram show an example of two tasks waiting on each other. The tasks are in a cycle or a deadlock. They use the Parallel Stacks window to find the problem and understand how to solve it.

 

If you are building multithreaded applications, check out these episodes to see how you can discover your threading and tasks issues faster and easier!

Author

Leslie Richardson
Program Manager

Leslie is a Program Manager on the C# developer experience team, focusing primarily on improving the overall .NET and C# productivity experience and feature set.

6 comments

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  • Slash Chen

    MS Build delivery is awesome and engaging.

  • Ameen Alyaghshy

    visual studio 2022 17.6 preview 4 is very bad edition
    it is full of errors and conflicts
    with .net maui app project
    xaml hot reload not working
    breakpoints on debugging makes vs freezes because of firewall issues
    and if you looked on internet there is a tons of unsolved problems
    and the most of answers
    go and download last version and updates to fix your issues
    and when you make updates nothing happened its just more problems shows up

    i love visual studio so and i am so sad because of all issues
    Microsoft visual studio developing team...

    Read more
  • Kasper van den Berg

    Thank you Ramkumar Ramesh for creating and improving this feature. And thank you all for showing it to me.

  • Asti R

    Parallel stacks has been super useful to me. Thank you for this!

  • Jorge Morales Vidal

    Nice!

  • Georgi Hadzhigeorgiev

    Awesome!