Tools for Assisting with Collection and Analyzing of Data for Problem Diagnosis

I was going through my Google Bookmarks and found a bunch of tools that are extremely helpful in diagnosing  many problems that occur on a web/app server and and interpreting the data collected. I’ve used all of them; they are all free and well known and used within the Community.  By no means is this an exhaustive list of all of the Tools and Add-Ins that I use - I'll get around to posting those someday : )

I’d start with the Data Collector. You can collect everything with Data Collector and then use the Log Parser and Visual Log Parser to help aggregate the data and even run queries against it. You may already know about some of these – but for those you haven’t seen, you should take a look!

Data Collector (supports IIS6 & IIS7, and can pull most other logs from any server):
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/carloc/archive/2010/02/01/idevdatacollector.aspx

Log Parser 2.2:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=890cd06b-abf8-4c25-91b2-f8d975cf8c07&displaylang=en

Visual Log Parser:
http://visuallogparser.codeplex.com/

Log File Analysis:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/delay/archive/2007/06/21/powerful-log-file-analysis-for-everyone-releasing-textanalysistool-net.aspx

Event Log Explorer:
http://www.eventlogxp.com/

IIS Log Analyzer (does graphs and reports):
http://www.iis.net/community/default.aspx?tabid=34&g=6&i=1864

IIS Diagnostics Toolkit (a suite of tools diagnosing Authentication, Authorization, SSL, Crash/Hang, etc.):
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9bfa49bc-376b-4a54-95aa-73c9156706e7

and then of course the "big daddy" bunch of them all - Debugging Tools for Windows:
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/debugging/default.mspx

I hope you find these useful : )

Interesting Metrics on the .NET Framework

Have you ever wondered how big the .NET Framework actually is?  Brad Abrams has an informative post on some of the metrics of the .NET Framework up to and including .NET 3.5.

I wonder what .NET 4 will look like?

Referencing platform-specific (x86/x64) assemblies in Visual Studio projects

CodeProjectRecently I've been thinking about how to make Assembly References dependent on the Platform Architecture for a given compiled application/library. A solution for this problem is necessary as you begin to move your apps to the x64 platform.

There are 2 solutions: one method is for "project-references"; the other is for "path-hardcoded dll references". Unfortunately, both involve manually editing the .csproj file yuk... AFAIK, there is no way to do this within the VisualStudio 2008 UI - I don't know about VS 2010. Note that it is NOT necessary to modify any of the references to the .NET dlls.

One quick note about these solutions is that they are independent of the Platform Architecture of the machine that is compiling the projects!

After opening the .csproj file in a text-editor (or as a .xml file within VisualStudio), do either of the following depending on your needs. Note that valid platform values are either: x86, x64, or ia64.

Platform-Specific Project References:

<ProjectReference Include="..\SomeLibrary.csproj" Condition="'$(Platform)' == 'x64'">

    <Project>{GUID of existing proj ref goes here...}</Project>

    <Name>SomeLibrary</Name>

</ProjectReference>

Platform-Specific Binary (.dll) References:

<Reference Include="SomeDll, Version=..., Culture=..., PublicKeyToken=..., processorArchitecture=x86" Condition="'$(Platform)' == 'x86'" />

    <SpecificVersion>False</SpecificVersion>

    <HintPath>C:\MyAppReferences\x86\SomeLibrary.dll</HintPath>

</Reference>

<Reference Include="SomeDll, Version=..., Culture=..., PublicKeyToken=..., processorArchitecture=x64" Condition="'$(Platform)' == 'x64'" />

    <SpecificVersion>False</SpecificVersion>

    <HintPath>C:\MyAppReferences\x64\SomeLibrary.dll</HintPath>

</Reference>