There is no perfect application. This chapter outlines strategies to mitigate software problems. It also discusses curing the bugs your application does have. The objective is to keep your application consistently stable, robust, efficient, and correct. One of the best practices to avoid future software problems and bugs is to fully implement the software development life cycle. Debugging desktop applications is different from debugging Web applications.

For example, desktop applications are typically local applications and short lived. These differences make it more complex to debug Web applications. Also debugging a production application is different from debugging a developmental application. Production applications are typically a release version. Also, production applications are better suited for post-mortem debugging. Make sure the proper symbols are available before debugging. If not, you will be unable to debug with symbolic information, which is more transparent. Vendors such as Microsoft publish symbol stores available for download with the appropriate symbols for their products. Visual Studio has several features that promote proactive debugging. MDAs isolate potential interoperability issues in managed applications. Code Analysis evaluates managed code against the Framework Design Guidelines and warns of problems. For debugging, you can download several debugging tools from the Debugging Tools for Windows Web site. Windbg is probably the most powerful tool available in this package. Load the SOS debugging extension into Windbg to perform managed debugging. ADPlus, another tool from Debugging Tools for Windows, is used to create dumps when an application crashes or hangs. ADPlus is also useful for creating dumps when the worker process recycles.