A while ago I got a tip of a colleague to use the DebugView utility from Sysinternals (Microsoft) to debug code. Once in a while I write a simple rules extension for Forefront Identity Manager, or even an attribute store for ADFS. As simple as they may be, sometimes things don’t go as I wish…

You can use DebugView by using the following lines in your coding: at the top of your class you make sure you have “using System.Diagnostics;” and everywhere you feel like you want diagnostic output you put “Debug.WriteLine(“your string here”);” It might be obvious, but you have to make sure you compile your code in Debug mode!

And perhaps a little sting here: make sure the DEBUG constant is enabled. It’s on by default though.

I’ve used this approach a few times now, but yesterday things went bad. After starting DebugView my server, a VM I was running on my Laptop, became sluggish. I still could reproduce my issue though, but nothing was being captured. Odd. After checking the task manager I found out my DebugView.exe process was using 100% CPU.

Off to google! I quickly found this topic: forum.sysinternals.com: DbgView.exe 100%CPU

Finding the DebugView version 4.76 is not that easy though, there’s a zillion sites just linking through to the Microsoft site and thus giving you version 4.79 every time. Finally I found this site which has the actual 4.76 version:  http://www.myfiledown.com/download/435608/debugview-435608-3.html But the link seems down now… Once I used this version my CPU usage was normal and my debug came out just fine.