Saturday, July 16, 2005

Confusing

I'm sorry, I must admit, I'm weak. I couldn't stand, I started to play with debugging. Thanks to Jon Langdon, Brad Abrams and Mike Stall's article I have implemented basic functionalities so far. The code is not on SourceForget yet though as I'm sure I'll rewrite it now that I know how it works.

Anyway, of course I use DILE whenever I need a disassembler but in a case I really found it useful.
A few days ago I had a problem. Just for fun, I tried to debug an ASP.NET application by attaching to it from DILE. But whenever I attached to the aspnet_wp.exe an exception was thrown. Later I tried the same on my machine also and everything worked fine. So, I thought here's the time to really use DILE. I know it's possible to debug a program without it's source code (by the way, a very good blog: Advanced .NET Debugging) but it's more fun to use my own program.
Thus I simply launched DILE, loaded itself in it, then started to debug it and from the new instance I attached to the aspnet_wp process and checked the first instance to see where is the exception thrown exactly and why. It was quite easy to find the problem.

Here's a screenshot (I like screenshots) illustrating the above mentioned situation. Though here I attach to a console application from the second DILE.



I think this is quite confusing. Debugging DILE in DILE. But it works. :-)