How do I take a good crash dump for .NET?

Question

I have captured a crash dump of my 32 bit .NET application running on a 64 bit Windows operating system. During the analysis somebody found out that I have a 64 bit dump and told me that it is not possible to analyze this dump due to wrong bitness.

When using Windows Task Manager to create the dump, I was not aware that I was doing something wrong. This always worked for 32 bit operating systems.

How can I take a good dump for .NET, especially with the correct bitness?

Answer 1

Why is bitness relevant here?

The bitness matters for .NET applications for the following reasons:

• a DAC (data access control) library (mscordakwks.dll) of the correct bitness is needed. There's no cross-bitness DAC available.
• the debugger needs to be able to load the SOS debugging extension of the correct bitness

It is not possible to convert a dump from 64 bit to 32 bit, although in theory it should contain all necessary information.

If you're feeling lucky, you can also try some of the instructions anyway

• How to use Windbg to debug a dump of a 32bit .NET app running on a x64 machine

How to detect the bitness of an application?

If you don't know the bitness, you can find it out like this:

Windows 7 Task Manager shows *32 on processes:

In Windows 8 task manager, go to the Details tab and add a column named Platform :

Visual Studio shows the bitness when attaching to the process:

Process Explorer can be configured to show the Image Type column:

Tools

Programs which detect bitness automatically:

• Process Explorer
• ProcDump
• Microsoft Visual Studio
• Windows Error Reporting LocalDumps

Tools which capture a dump with specific bitness:

• 64 Bit: default Task Manager on a 64 bit OS
• 32 Bit: Task manager run from %windir%\\SysWOW64\\taskmgr.exe on a 64 Bit OS
• 64 Bit: ProcDump run with the -64 command line switch
• 32 Bit: WinDbg x86 version
• 64 Bit: WinDbg x64 version
• 32 Bit: DebugDiag x86 version
• 64 Bit: DebugDiag x64 version
• 32 Bit: ADPlus x86 version
• 64 Bit: ADPlus x64 version

Just choose the bitness according to your application, not according the OS.

Why is memory relevant here?

For .NET you need a full memory dump, otherwise you cannot figure out the content of the objects. To include full memory, do the following:

• in WinDbg, specify /ma when doing .dump
• in Process Explorer , choose "Create full dump" (although technically, the result is still a minidump)
• in ProcDump , apply the -ma command line switch
• in Visual Studio, choose "Minidump with heap"
• Task Manager will always create a dump with full memory
• For Windows Error Reporting LocalDumps set DumpType to 2

Visual Studio instructions

I found out that many developers aren't even aware that Visual Studio can create dumps. The reason probably is that the menu is invisible for a long time. These are the steps:

• Start Visual Studio: menu is invisible
• Attach to a process: menu is still invisible
• Break: menu becomes visible (find it under Debug / Save dump as)

Why 64 bit dumps of 32 bit applications at all?

Probably just for debugging the WoW64 layer itself.