Posts

All the articles I've posted.

• Using dotPeek to figure out why IIS crashed

  15 Mar, 2017

  Here’s a story on how I once used dotPeek to provide debugger symbols and (decompiled) source code for a crashed application for which we had nothing but the application assemblies available. Namespaces have been altered to protect the innocent. Nothing better than a good cup of coffee in the morning! Opening up the issue tracker, “the folks from IT” logged an issue about an application server crashing over night. They automatically captured a crash dump of the IIS worker process and attached it to the issue - this should help in diagnosing the root cause of that crash. One more coffee refill, and then let’s dive in!

• Application Insights telemetry processors

  31 Jan, 2017

• Exploring .NET managed heap with ClrMD

  3 Jan, 2017

  Since my posts on making code allocate less memory and memory allocation for strings were quite well received, I decided to add another post to the series: Exploring .NET managed heap with ClrMD. In this post, we’ll explore what is inside .NET’s managed heap (you know, the thing where we alocate our objects), how it’s structured and how we can do some cool tricks with it. We’ll even replicate dotMemory’s dominators/path to root feature. So what is ClrMD? ClrMD is the short name for the Microsoft.Diagnostics.Runtime package which lets us inspect a crash dump or attach to a live process and perform all sorts of queries against the runtime. For example walking the heap (which we’ll do later), inspecting the finalizer queue, and more. In this series:

• Exploring memory allocation and strings

  15 Nov, 2016

  A while back, I wrote about making code allocate less memory (go read it now if you haven’t). In that post, we saw how the Garbage Collector works and how it decides to keep objects around in memory or reclaim them. There’s one specific type we never touched on in that post: strings. Why would we? They look like value types, so they aren’t subject to Garbage Collection, right? Well… Wrong. Strings are objects like any other object and follow the same rules. In this post, we will look at how they behave in terms of memory allocation. Let’s see what that means. In this series:

• Making .NET code less allocatey - Allocations and the Garbage Collector

  19 Oct, 2016

• Hotel California

  10 Oct, 2016

  At the start of 2015, I checked out from JetBrains to join Microsoft. Today, after almost two years in the NuGet team, it’s time for change. Microsoft and NuGet have been a fun ride, and I got to complete my personal mission… I remember Paul Stack trolling me (“Hey Maarten, is NuGet down?”) on more than one occasion, and am really happy that I got the freedom and support for changing that. The quest towards server stability even got me a well-received conference talk, “Sherlock Homepage”. Thanks Jeff (x2), Yishai, Hari, Jun and team! Mission accomplished! And thanks for the great walks in wonderful Washington state when I was over there, I’ll sure miss stopping by that region every once in a while.

• NuGet and NPM news from the community

  29 Sep, 2016

  You may know (or not, shame on you!) Xavier Decoster and myself are operating MyGet, a hosted service providing teams with hosting and management of NuGet, npm, Bower, VSIX and debugger symbols. Recently, we started looking into how we could do better on the content marketing front, an important piece of getting people to visit and hopefully sign up to our service. We decided on starting a series on the MyGet blog, named “NuGet and NPM news from the community”.

• Building NuGet (.NET Core) using Atlassian Bitbucket Pipelines

  17 Aug, 2016

  A while back, I signed up for the beta of Bitbucket Pipelines, a new continuous integration service from Atlassian, built into Bitbucket. The build system promises easy configuration using YAML files to describe the build steps. It runs builds in a Docker image, so that means we can also use it for building and packaging .NET Core libraries. Let’s see how. I created a simple .NET Core library which contains a useless Hello.cs class, and a project.json that holds project metadata. The class itself is not very interesting, the project.json file is:

• Someone broke the Internet! Or why you may want to mirror your dependencies…

  23 Mar, 2016

  Twitter celebrated its 10th birthday this week, and those who have been on that social network long enough know that at least once a week there’s a massive outrage about something that, in the end, usually does not seem so bad. This week’s topic: someone broke the Internet!

• Disabling session affinity in Azure App Service Web Apps (Websites)

  23 Dec, 2015

  In one of our production systems, we’re using Azure Websites to host a back-end web API. It runs on several machines and benefits from the automatic load balancing we get on Azure Websites. When going through request logs, however, we discovered that of these several machines a few were getting a lot of traffic, some got less and one even only got hit by our monitoring system and no other traffic. That sucks! In our back-end web API we’re not using any session state or other techniques where we’d expect the same client to always end up on the same server. Ideally, we want round-robin load balancing, distributing traffic across machines as much as possible. How to do this with Azure Websites?