Visual Studio Toolbox: Debug Threads & Tasks with Parallel Stacks

Leslie Richardson

April 6th, 20236 7

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!