Can VS2010 help me find memory leaks?

Question

I'm going through the pain right now of finding memory leaks in my application using WinDbg. Luckily, I've found a few good articles that give a very good step-by-step process of how to do it. Still, it is a fairly painful process. Does VS2010 have any built in features that can ease the burden of finding a memory leak in a Silverlight application? Of course, a memory leak in .NET sounds a bit like a misnomer, but what I intend to do is to find all objects that are still referencing an object that I believe should be garbage collected.

For those that may be interested, here are some good articles on how to get started using WinDbg to find memory leaks in Silverlight:

• Finding Memory Leaks In Silverlight With WinDbg
• Hunting down memory leaks in Silverlight
• Where's your leak at? (Using WinDbg, SOS, and GCRoot to diagnose a .NET memory leak)

Answer 1

A Memory leak in .NET applications isn't a misnomer at all. I've had this problem in applications I've worked on, both Winforms and Webforms.

WinDbg + SOS.dll is painful compared to the ANTS Profiler. Normally I wouldn't tout a product, but if you're working for a company, they will save a lot of money by buying that product. It'll save you time having to look for memory leaks, and developer time is almost always more expensive than purchasing an application.

Answer 2

Hey,

I don't thing VS 2010 has this; I remember Microsoft did have http://memprofiler.com/ as a memory profiler for finding leaks, and there are other third party tools.

HTH.