Azure Application Insights Debugging Using the Call Stack

Question

I am trying to figure out a way to debug the exceptions I received in Azure Application. I am new to this type of debugging, since I really dealt with errors in Visual Studio, where the active debugger is running. However, with Application Insights, there are null reference exceptions that provide only a call stack and do not contain a useful exception message.

Exception Message: Arg_NullReferenceException

CallStack: at SharedLibrary!<BaseAddress>+0x68d4c5 --- End of stack trace from previous location where exception was thrown --- at SharedLibrary!<BaseAddress>+0x329115 at SharedLibrary!<BaseAddress>+0x329207 at SharedLibrary!<BaseAddress>+0x34d603

Other exceptions have messages such as Excep_FromHResult 0x800455A0 , while others actually show the methods they refer to.

Is there any way to find where these exceptions came from decrypting the call or base address or HResult?

This will be very useful for troubleshooting errors in my application.

Answer 1

UPDATE: this is now supported by the HockeyApp telemetry stack. See: http://support.hockeyapp.net/kb/client-integration-windows-and-windows-phone/crash-reporting-for-uwp

When your application is compiled with .NET Native, the resulting binary does not contain all the rich metadata that is commonly available for .NET applications. (You get the same behavior if you call Environment.StackTrace when compiling with .NET Native.) We write all this data to the pdb file that is generated, but it is not available at runtime.

The solution here is to post facto rebuild your stacks using information from pdb files. I know that the AppInsights team had this behind, but it didn't seem to happen. We have some diagnostic tools that we are trying to publish so that you can do this re-scrolling yourself, but there was a little swamp to publish them.

If you send mail to [e-mail] describing this problem, it may help to lubricate some wheels.