!injectdll – a remote thread approach

In the last post I presented you my first WinDbg extension with a !injectdll command. Theoretically everything was correct, but after some more testing I noticed that the command is not always working as expected. Andrey Bazhan was pretty quick in pointing this out and advised me to use a remote thread, which, as you will see, is a much better approach. But let’s first have a look at the problems in lld 1.0.

!injectdll – a WinDbg extension for DLL injection

Today I have a pleasure to present you my first WinDbg extension lld 🙂 For now it contains only one command: !injectdll, which allows you to inject a DLL into the process being debugged. There is a similar command in the sdbgext extension, but it works only for 32-bit processes. The usage is extremly simple – just remember to load the extension in the correct bitness (32-bit version for 32-bit processes). Example session may look as follows:

0:000> .load lld
0:000> !injectdll c:\temp\Test.exe
ModLoad: 00000001`3f820000 00000001`3f924000   c:\temp\Test.exe
ModLoad: 000007fe`fd960000 000007fe`fd98e000   C:\Windows\system32\IMM32.DLL
ModLoad: 000007fe`ff410000 000007fe`ff519000   C:\Windows\system32\MSCTF.dll
(bac.5a0): Break instruction exception - code 80000003 (first chance)
ntdll!LdrpDoDebuggerBreak+0x30:
00000000`778c7800 cc              int     3

The binaries can be found under the release tab of the source code repository.

NetExt – SOS on steroids

I have been playing recently with quite a new windbg extension (released by Rodney Viana from Microsoft) called NetExt. Rodney Viana published an introductory post about it, which you may find on his blog. In this post I would like to show you my usage samples as well as encourage you to start using it by yourself. Netext documentation is thorough and nicely organized which is good because at the beginning you probably will spend a lot of time on this page 🙂 In paragraphs that follow I will focus mainly on dump debugging, but most of the techniques presented here should work as well in live debugging sessions.

A case of a deadlock in a .NET application

I recently had an interesting issue in one of our applications. The SMS router, responsible for sending and receiving SMSes, hanged – there was no CPU usage and we haven’t observed any activity in the application logs. I collected a full memory dump and restarted the service, which seemed to come back to its normal state. Curious what happened I opened the dump in WinDbg, loaded PDE and SOS and started an investigation

Timeouts when making web requests in .NET

In one of our applications I recently observed timeouts in code performing HTTP requests to the REST service. While investigating this issue I discovered few interesting facts about System.Net namespace and would like to share them with you. We were using objects of type System.Net.HttpWebRequest in our code, but some of the information presented in this post will also apply to the newer System.Net.HttpClient implementation.