Profiler crashes when trying to profile anything

Mdozier

I am developing on a Windows Server 2003 VM using VMWare. I purchased and installed the .NET Developers Bundle. I am not able to profile my ASP.NET application which is built with Visual Studio 2008. Every time I launch the profiler and select the options, the profiler UI will crash as it is trying to connect. I created a simple Windows application and tried to profile it. The same thing happened.

I have a separate Win Server 2008 VM with a project I am developing with Visual Studio 2010 and do not have any problems profiling it.

I also created a new Win Server 2003 VM just to make sure there wasn't anything on the original that would cause this problem and got the same crash.

Brian Donahue

Hello,


Can you please explain the nature of the "crash"? Is there an error report, and did you "send it to red gate" or is the app your profiling actually the thing that is "crashing"? If so, can you get a memory dump or stack trace from the faulting application?

Thanks!

Mdozier

The profiler UI disappears with no error dialog. I have look in the event log and the red gate logs and can not find an error. The app that the profiler is going to profile launches with no error.

Brian Donahue

Well, that isn't very helpful of us. Can you try attaching a debugger? You can use ftp://support.red-gate.com/utilities/re ... bugger.zip and use RedFlag.exe. Use Actions->launch process to run RedGate.Profiler.ui.exe and any exceptions should appear in the "exceptions" window.

Mdozier

I ran the debugger. The exceptions at the end are three System.ArguementException with message 'Invalid type owner for DynamicMethod'. I can upload the report xml if it will help.

I did noticed that the UI uses DevExpress controls version 10.1. We use DevExpress version 10.2. I doubt this is causing a problem, but thought I would mention it.

Brian Donahue

You can send the xml to support at red-gate.com if you want and I'll have a look. Some exceptions are perfectly normal such as the dynamic method one.

Mdozier

I sent it earlier today. Not sure if you got it.

Brian Donahue

Well, whatever is happening is not happening at the runtime-level. The only thing I can think of now is to get a memory dump.
ftp://support.red-gate.com/utilities/AutoDumper.zip
Extract all files to disk, open a command prompt and run
cscript adplus.vbs -crash -pn RedGate.Profiler.UI.exe

If profiler exits unexpectedly, there should be a full dump file created. We can have a look at this and see why the runtime stopped.

I can set up an FTP account for you to upload it to.

Mdozier

I have figured out that there is a conflict with the profiler and one of our products which is a windows service that exposes a COM layer. I used a different profiler to get the information that I needed so there the need for the ANTS profiler on this VM is not as great. I won't be able to send you the memory dump since it has information about our product in it. Not sure why the profiler is trying to load it, but will have to punt on this for now. Thanks for trying got help.

Brian Donahue

The only thing that comes to mind is that your COM component uses exactly the same GUID and ANTS Performance Profiler's COM component. Either that, or the runtime was configured to load your component instead of ANTS.