Thoughts on Advanced .NET Debugging book

Here are some thoughts on Advanced .NET Debugging book.

The book is written from software development point of view. Examples reference to source code. Information is used in debugging examples taken from source code and from debugging symbol files. Therefore some examples are not applicable on binaries without source code information.

Most of the debugging examples rely on SOS and SOSEX Windbg plugins. Online help for those plugins are already available, and this book doesn't seem to add new information to them, albeit it demonstrates examples with snippet copied from Windbg command window.

ILDasm is a great tool but there is so little about it in this book. Particularly, I'd like to see, for example, that the information extracted from binaries by ILDasm can be used during debugging; a kind of guide to use statically acquired information during dynamic analysis.

The author describes some low-level structures in an accessible manner, but some topics aren't discussed while others are overwhelmed with theory. There is very little information about IL instructions, however I'd expect more on that because that's a key area to understand to effectively debug .NET programs.

The author doesn't go beyond a certain point when discussing certain topics, for example, it's not discussed how the code generation works that would be useful to match IL code blocks to their native counterparts. (MSDN describes how can be done this via profiler or debugging interfaces of .NET Framework.)

The figures about internal structures or flow charts, etc. seem to be simple and easy to follow them, I liked these parts.

I particularly liked the Managed Heap and Garbage Collection chapter.

If you're an engineer who wants to troubleshoot software failures this book is a good one to start with. However, if you're a reverse engineer who wants to debug binaries without having debug or source information available you might need an other book with different approach.