Is a mini dump useful for debugging in .NET

Question

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

Mini Dump Snapshots and SOS

vs

Minidumps are all but useless in .NET

They seem like would be useful to me, why might they be considered useless by some?

Answer 1

Because 'minidump' is a very vague term, which covers files that contain widely varying amounts of information.

A dump file with little more than stacks in it is much less useful for .NET than in the unmanaged world, that's true, but you don't have to make dump files that small.

Answer 2

The main difference is that the former article is from 2005 when .NET 4 was not released, the second one 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 managed callstack. See min set of parameters that must be passed to 'MiniDumpWriteDump' to be enough for !clrstack: What is minimum MINIDUMP_TYPE set to dump native C++ process that hosts .net component to be able to use !clrstack in windbg

Answer 4

Be careful when creating minidumps of 32-bit processes on a 64-bit machine. ProcDump utility seems to work well. These dumps will open successfully in VS2010.