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Debugging and Profiling ApplicationsĀ 

To debug a .NET Framework application, the compiler and runtime environment must be configured to enable a debugger to attach to the application and to produce both symbols and line maps, if possible, for the application and its corresponding Microsoft intermediate language (MSIL). Once a managed application is debugged, it can be profiled to boost performance. Profiling evaluates and describes the lines of source code that generate the most frequently executed code, and how much time it takes to execute them.

The .NET Framework applications are easily debugged using Visual Studio, which handles many of the configuration details. If Visual Studio is not installed, you can examine and improve the performance of .NET Framework applications in several alternative ways using the following:

The .NET Framework namespace System.Diagnostics includes the Trace, Debug, and TraceSource classes for tracing execution flow, and the Process, EventLog, and PerformanceCounter classes for profiling code. The Cordbg.exe command-line debugger can be used to debug managed code from the command-line interpreter. DbgCLR.exe is a debugger with the familiar Windows interface for debugging managed code.

In This Section

  • Enabling Profiling
    Shows how to set environment variables to tie a .NET Framework application to a profiler.
  • Tracing and Instrumenting Applications
    Describes how to monitor the execution of your application while it is running, and how to instrument it to display how well it is performing or whether something has gone wrong.