Published
Thursday, November 24, 2005 3:00 PM
OK, so I'll admit this is a bit cheeky: this entry should almost certainly be .NET Oddities #2a because it's so closely related to #2, but there. You may have noticed, and in fact I already knew this, that OutOfMemoryException (like StackOverflowException)
has a null value for its StackTrace property. Again, this can be a
total pain in the butt, however fortunately for me it was Dan that did
the hard work and tracked it down this morning (for which I'm
exceedingly grateful). Of course, things are never quite that simple,
and it turned out that the bug behind all of this was actually
elsewhere in the code, so I didn't totally escape having to do some
work.
I should also qualify all of this by saying that it isn't just .NET
that behaves in this way. The most recent version of Java that I used
in anger (1.4.2) also behaves like this: no stack trace from OutOfMemoryError.
Now admittedly I want to have my cake and eat it, but how useful would
it be if the JVM and CLR provided this information, even if it was only
a partial stack trace from the point where the exception/error occurred
back up through a few stack frames? I think that would be very cool
indeed, although somehow the VMs in question would need to reserve
enough memory to pull off this little trick, and it could well be a
complete pain to implement, and, well you get the picture... but in an
ideal world, how cool would it be?
Anyway, "You may say that I'm a dreamer..." ;-)
That's all for now. The new version of DTS Package Compare (formerly DTS Compare) is coming along a treat so I'm going to get back to it. Watch this space.
About Bart Read
Bart has done many things since he started work at Red Gate Software Ltd in August 2004, but nowadays he's (mainly) the product manager for the .NET Developer Tools. He still feels like this is a bit like admitting you were cheering for the Empire whilst watching Star Wars, but for now he's along for the ride. In a previous incarnation he was a project manager leading the .NET Reflector Pro, ANTS Memory Profiler 5, ANTS Performance Profiler 4 & 5, and SQL Prompt 3.0 - 3.6 projects. He still occasionally writes some code and, in the past, has touched the code for most of the Red Gate SQL developer tools... some of them still haven't recovered from the shock. He was born and grew up in Dorset, was educated in Nottingham and London, and likes music and real ale. His photo is extremely misleading.