I'm developing a bridge to allow agents to interact with my Windbg session. I tested it with an old dump, the agent ran a bunch of commands and immediately crashed Windbg. So now we're debugging Windbg.

New issue of .NET R&D Digest is here! Thx to @simonwillison.net, @birgitta410.bsky.social, @kief.com, @lemire.bsky.social, @kevingosse.net, @andrewlock.bsky.social, @meziantou.net, @stevesanderson.bsky.social & other authors for their g8 content! #dotnet olegkarasik.wordpress.com/2026/04/03/n...

I'm still experimenting with exactly how to include it in my workflow, but Claude is so good at reverse engineering that it's really a game changer for advanced debugging. Everything is open-source if you're fluent in assembly code.

Where does the .NET community live nowadays? Because apparently posting a technical article on reddit is considered self-promotion and forbidden except on Saturday. Honestly I'm speechless.

Have you ever noticed that a simple .NET Core applications on 64-bit uses more than 2TB of virtual memory? In a new episode of the series "writing a .NET garbage collector in C#", we discover the kind of problem that it intends to solve: minidump.net/writing-a-ne...

I like Copilot CLI but the billing model stresses me out a little. Because there's no hourly or daily limit, I worry that I might run out of requests before the end of the month, and use them very conservatively. Then I end the month with a lot of unused quota. So I built a tool.

I'm trying GPT-5.4 and scratching my head when seeing the generated code. What reasoning process could lead to explicitly initializing to null a property, _and_ using the null-forgiving operator.

ClipPing got a major update! The tool displays a visual notification whenever the content of the clipboard changes, for all of you who are tired of ctrl+c not working. I added configurable overlays, and some QoL improvements (like automatically starting the tool with Windows).

It's crazy that Windows will post notifications for the most unsignificant stuff (like the unfamous "Windows Defender Antivirus did not find any threats"), but I had to check my event viewer for completely unrelated reasons to randomly discover that one of my HDDs is dying.

I published part 8 of my "Writing a .NET Garbage Collector in C#" series. The subject this time is interior pointers: what are they, and why are they so challenging for the GC. minidump.net/writing-a-ne...

I'm surprised that "dotnet tool install -g" uses the local nuget config, if any. For local tools, I get it. For global tools, I would expect it to always use the userprofile config. Sounds a bit dangerous? Like, if you run the command from your Downloads or temp folder and you have a leftover file.

Pro-tip: even if it's tempting, resist the urge to argue with copilot

I got "tricked" by PerfView when using it to measure the effectiveness of my optimizations, so I decided to write about it: minidump.net/an-unexpecte... It's not specific to PerfView though, in theory this could happen with any profiler.

I published a new article in my "Writing a .NET GC in C#" series. This time, we implement a better storage for the handles, and we properly mark them during garbage collection. We also see why DependentHandles are annoying to deal with. minidump.net/writing-a-ne...

After a long wait, I've finally published the sixth part in my "Writing a .NET Garbage Collector in C#" series. Today, we start implementing mark and sweep. minidump.net/writing-a-ne...

If you missed this video, I strongly recommend watching it. It's a great introduction to 3D graphics, short and easy to understand. I had a lot of fun reimplementing it in Winforms and text mode.

Today I ran into a deadlock in VS2026. I debugged it, and it turned out to be a common issue you may run into when writing a profiler. I wrote a short article about it: minidump.net/investigatin...

Visual Studio 2026 18.1.1 has been released. I strongly recommend upgrading if you're using ReSharper, as it fixes an issue that was making startup significantly slower. Thanks a lot to the VS team for their reactivity!

Blogged: Creating a .NET CLR profiler using C# and NativeAOT with Silhouette andrewlock.net/creating-a-d... In this post I look at how to create a simple .NET profiler. But instead of using C++, the profiler uses C# and NativeAOT with @kevingosse.net's Silhouette library #dotnet

I like the peace of mind that @backblaze.bsky.social is offering, especially after my recent SSD crash. But god, their support is beyond bad. I've contacted them twice, and both times I had to solve the issue myself after a completely unhelpful exchange.

There are Mondays, and then there are "the computer doesn't recognize the dev SSD anymore" Mondays. Samsung 990 Pro 2TB. I tried pretty much everything I could think of, including moving it to a different M2 slot. Suggestions are welcome. The drive doesn't appear in the bios.

I was investigating a crash, and pasted my windbg output to ChatGPT to see if it could come up with any lead. It noticed something that I completely missed, a memory area that I dumped in binary was actually a string (even though it's not supposed to be). That's really nice and unexpected.

Focusing on the Rust Unwrap in the CloudFlare outage is really the scalability equivalent of "When a sage points to the moon, all the fool sees is the finger". At that scale, failures *will* happen. Programming error are unavoidable. What's interesting is why it took down the entire system.

Fun fact: you can't use print screen to capture a screenshot of a crash of SnippingTool

#UCP25 | Kevin Gosse - The Hidden Life of Method Calls Kevin reveals in his session what really happens when your code runs: ➡️ calling conventions ➡️ stack frames ➡️ JIT compilation ➡️ virtual dispatch ➡️ CPU-level mechanics ➡️ prague.updateconf.net #DotNet #Performance @kevingosse.net @woodruff.dev

I had a ton of fun at Techorama NL. It's not everyday that you get a chance to debug variadic .NET functions on a giant movie theater screen.

We are getting closer to the release of Resharper 2025.3 , so I ran some performance tests to see how much we improved compared to 2025.2. For this iteration, I focused my effort mainly on the huge Datadog.Trace solution, available on the DataDog/dd-trace-dotnet repository. Results below 👇

I just published a new article: Using profiler function hooks in .NET with Silhouette. In the process, we also learn how to use static linking with NativeAOT. minidump.net/using-functi...

New blog post: In 2021 I found an invisible memory leak in a tool (VS Code) that I have never used. Impossible? Easy: randomascii.wordpress.com/2025/10/09/f...

There's an even more adverse effect to the way closures are allocated: sharplab.io#v2:EYLgxg9gT... Because the same closure is reused for different calls, you can end up extending the lifetime of some of your objects without realizing it.

Top thing I wish I had known earlier as a software engineer: before leaving a company, make sure to download your favorite slack emojis, so you don't have to frenetically look for them on the web when you realize they're missing from the new slack.

Worked at Datadog, encountered crashes because of mysterious race-conditions in .NET writeable metadata: github.com/dotnet/runti... Moved to JetBrains, encountered crashes because of mysterious race-conditions in .NET writeable metadata: github.com/dotnet/runti... I think I'm cursed.

As requested, I published an article about how the UI profiler works: minidump.net/measuring-ui... It allows me to measure the responsiveness of Visual Studio when running with ReSharper, in various conditions. I also made the source code available on github: github.com/kevingosse/U...

Congrats to Microsoft on this new release, I've been using it for a few weeks now and it really feels great. Note that Resharper is already compatible, if you want to try it!

Not entirely sure what I'm going to do with all that money.

I just discovered that whenever you create a closure in a generic C# method, the closure is also generic even when it's not needed. This is very frustrating to me because generics cause performance issues in Resharper (see bsky.app/profile/kevi...) sharplab.io#v2:EYLgxg9gT...

Monday

I can't recommend strongly enough to use an unlimited online backup service (I use @backblaze.bsky.social). Backup your whole disk and forget about it. Just today, I realized I lost some code I wrote months ago (~2 days of work). Painlessly restored it from the automatic backup.

To help reduce the number of UI freezes caused by Resharper, I built an internal tool to measure UI responsiveness. Here, you can see the improvement between the current 2025.1 version (on the left) and the upcoming 2025.2 version (on the right) with out-of-process enabled.

As I work on Resharper performance, I learn about limitations of .NET (at least, .NET Framework) that I wasn't aware of. Here, I shaved 1 second of CPU time on startup by... removing a call to Array.Empty<T>.

Working on performance, it's a lot of time wasted on dead-ends and getting the impression of making no progress, and then suddenly managing to shave 10 seconds of CPU time off R# startup.

One thing I like about working on a new codebase is finding all those low-hanging fruits, optimizations that have a significant impact for a relatively low effort. Here, before/after, squashing ~140 MB of heap allocations from Resharper licensing code.

I really enjoyed participating to the last 2codeOrNot2code, so I'm happy to repeat the experience. This time, we will have some fun with functions, unveiling interesting details about what happens when you call them. If you like to understand how things work, don't miss it!

I'm experimenting with interfacing dnlib with my Silhouette library. The .NET profiling API provides almost no helper at all to manipulate IL, it just exposes the method body as a binary blob. Having access to dnlib greatly simplifies IL rewriting. github.com/kevingosse/S...

I released v2.0.0 of Silhouette, my library to write .NET profilers in C#. The main change is the addition of IMetadataImport2. There are a few small breaking changes, so I'm embracing semver and bumping the major version number. github.com/kevingosse/S...

sourceof.net now redirects to github.com/microsoft/re.... I really hope Microsoft will reconsider this change, code navigation on Github isn't even remotely as good as what we had before (basically source.dot.net but for .NET Framework)

I've been playing with "Next edit suggestions" in Visual Studio (devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio...) and in my opinion it crosses the fine line between "useful AI" and "noisy AI". Too many irrelevant suggestions, and hard to ignore without pressing esc. I hope they can tone it down.

Today I needed some information about method jitting in R#, but ETW was missing some bits. It was a nice opportunity to test Silhouette, and it only took me a few hours to write a profiler to retrieve everything I needed. (and yes, it's XML, I'm old 👴)

Time to make it official: starting Monday, I'll be leaving Datadog and joining JetBrains as principal engineer 🎉 I'll be working on various topics, but one of my first responsibilities will be to improve the performance of Resharper, which is a thrilling but frightening challenge.

Pro .NET Memory Management The co-authors of the 2nd edition - Konrad Kokosa, @chrisnas.bsky.social, @kevingosse.net - talk about the content and the book per se. Join with your curiosity and your questions to the trio. 2025-03-25 18:00 UTC #dotnet #CSharp #Memory www.youtube.com/watch?v=DboS...