Windows Developer Power Tools

15.8 Debugging Hangs and Monitoring Processes with Managed Stack Explorer

Do you ever need to get stack traces for your .NET 2.0 applications? Want a quick and easy way to monitor managed processes and threads? Need to be able to view a thread’s stack trace to investigate an application hang? If so, Managed Stack Explorer (MSE) is for you.

MSE, created by Microsoft’s Developer Solutions Team, is a lightweight tool that provides a quick and easy way to monitor .NET 2.0 managed processes and their stacks. The ability to view a program’s stack and how it changes over time is an important aid in determining possible reasons for errors. MSE provides a simple interface to allow you to monitor multiple processes at once and build periodic stack logfiles. MSE works by quickly attaching to a process when a stack trace is requested, and then detaching the moment the stack trace has been retrieved. This way, the interference in the normal operation of the process is minimized.

Managed Stack Explorer at a Glance
Tool	Managed Stack Explorer
Version covered	1.0
Home page	http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=59380
Power Tools page	http://www.windevpowertools.com/tools/77
Summary	Lightweight tool that provides a quick and easy way to monitor .NET 2.0 managed processes and their stacks
License type	Microsoft Permissive License (Ms-PL)
Online resources	Documentation, forum, bug tracker
Supported Frameworks	.NET 2.0 ...