I’m continuing to read the excellent Advanced .NET Debugging by Mario Hewardt. Last time I looked at finding the entry point of a native image. This time around I’ll be investigating the launch of a managed image by Windows.

Prerequisites

• A hex viewer
  • I used the PE CLR Viewer (disclaimer: I created this truly ugly looking website)

Today’s exercise is not an exercise! The investigation I’m about to describe was triggered by a production outage affecting multiple APIs - albeit not at the same time - at a customer. For obvious reasons I’ll not be able to share the code and will have to alter / obfuscate some of the commands’ results. I still think this is a valuable exercise as it is a classic example of an easy to make mistake leading to a catastrophic result.

The other interesting point is that I had no idea what the issue was so I’ll not be following a script as I did in the first instalment.

30th of Jan 2022: Many .NET open-source have now migrated to GitHub Actions. I hence decided to include it in this post.

25th of Sep 2021: I decided to remove Travis CI from this post. Travis CI recently poorly handled a security vulnerability and security is of paramount importance when it comes to build systems.

5th of Jan 2019: a lot has been happening since I initially wrote this post. Azure DevOps released a free tier for open source projects, the Cake and GitVersion contributors have been hard at work to take advantage of the latest features of .NET Core. So many things have changed that I decided to update this post to reflect the current state of affairs (inclusion of Azure DevOps, upgrade to .NET Core 2.2, utilisation of .NET Core global tools and removing the Mono requirement on Unix platforms).

As a developer I’m amazed by the number of free tools and services available. I wanted to create an end-to-end demo of a CI/CD pipeline that would include:

• Trigger a build on commit
• Use semantic versioning
• Run tests
• Publish test results
• Create NuGet packages
• Publish the NuGet packages
• Create a GitHub release

For my purpose I wanted anonymous users to have access to a read-only view. AppVeyor and GitHub Actions are the most popular choices for .NET open-source projects. CircleCI seems to have dropped in popularity. Azure DevOps released (and then unreleased) a free and unlimited plan for open source projects. As I had both CircleCI and Azure DevOps working, I decided to keep them. In this post I’ll be leveraging the four platforms so that I can highlight their pros and cons.

After eyeing it for a while I finally decided to buy Advanced .NET Debugging by Mario Hewardt. I’ve been studying WinDbg for some time and consider myself somewhere between beginner and intermediate level. To my dismay I got stuck on the first excercise! Luckily I didn’t give up and finally stumbled on a blog post that unblocked me. This series has for goal to make Advanced .NET Debugging more accessible to people - quite like me - that haven’t grasped all the concepts yet.

Prerequisites

• A hex viewer
  • I used the hexdump for VSCode Visual Studio Code extension
• WinDbg
• Windows