Capturing a snapshot of a running .net application for playback in a debugger later.

Question

This is probably just a crazy pipe dream but I thought I would ask if something like this exists anyway...

Have you ever been here... Somebody in the QA team files a bug but when you (the developer) try to repro the bug, its almost impossible to reproduce the exact set of steps that lead to the problem. This is especially common where multiple threads are involved.

I was thinking it would be great if it was possible to capture the entire memory state of a running application, including its callstack, current function ptr etc etc. In essence, dehydrate the application to a binary blob.

Now, if that blob could be passed to the developer to be "Rehydrated" back to it's last state ready to have a debugger attached, it would significantly speed up the fixing for these kinds of issues where one spends half a day repro'ing and 30 seconds fixing.

Does anybody know if a tool like this exists for .net?

Answer 1

I remember reading that something along these lines is included as part of the higher-end Visual Studio Test Editions.

It seems to be referred to as "Visual Studio Team Lab Management". This enables testers to save the state of a whole (virtual) machine at the point a bug occurs and include this snapshot along with the bug report. Combined with IntelliSense (again, only in the higer-end Visual Studio edition), it enables the developer to examine the running state of code, starting at the point the bug occurs.

Answer 2

Visual studio 2010 ultimate and Microsoft test runner do exactly what your describing. Test runner allows QA to add video to bug reports, stack info etc then the developer can load everthing in VS.

Think it is quite expensive though.