It is a mini dump useful for debugging in .NET.

Question

I see some conflicting opinions about mini-dumps for .NET debugging, for example:

Thumbnails of dumps and SOS

vs

Minidumps are almost useless in .NET

They seem useful to me, why can some of them be considered useless?

Answer 1

Because "minidump" is a very vague term that encompasses files that contain many different amounts of information.

A dump file with a small number of stacks in it is much less useful for .NET than in an unmanaged world, this is true, but you do not need to make small dumps.

Answer 2

The main difference is that the previous article from 2005, when .NET 4 was not released, the second talks about .NET 4.

The ability to easily debug managed mini dumps was introduced in .NET 4.

Answer 3

At least it can give you a manageable column. See The minimum set of parameters that must be passed in "MiniDumpWriteDump", sufficient for! Clrstack: What is the minimum MINIDUMP_TYPE set to unload your own C ++ process, which hosts the .net component that it can use! clrstack in windbg

Answer 4

Be careful when creating mini-disks of 32-bit processes on a 64-bit machine . The ProcDump utility works fine. These landfills will open successfully in VS2010.