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When I profile my .net 4.5 application, VS profiler only shows msvcr120_clr0400.dll. It also fails to load its symbols. Here is the output of the profiler

Output of the profiler

Failed to load symbols for C:\Windows\System32\msvcr120_clr0400.dll

I found no information regarding this dll. I followed this post: I unchecked Just My Code option and tried to generate pdb files of the dll with ngen, however ngen complains that given file is not a valid image.

The specified native image is not valid. Unspecified error (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80004005 (E_FAIL))

I have no reference to this dll in my References. I have three 3rd party libraries: C5, MathNet, MIConvexHull. Rest is ordinary C# code.

When I create new project and do a performance analysis there, it works fine. I further added 3rd party libraries to this new project, still profiling worked fine.

Community
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Halil
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  • I have completely given up on getting any useful info out of the VS2013 profiler, it is just too broken. On Windows 8.1 anyway. Fingers crossed for an update. No trouble getting debugging info for that DLL however, you do need to enable the Microsoft Symbol server. Tools + Options, Debugging, Symbols. – Hans Passant Apr 09 '14 at 13:42
  • Microsoft Symbol Server is already enabled and in fact I'm using VS2012. Does it also have some bugs like this? – Halil Apr 09 '14 at 13:51

1 Answers1

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Are you using Windows 8.1 by any chance? If you are using sampling on Windows 8.1, you need to upgrade to VS2012 Update 4 (or a newer version of VS) in order to be able to resolve symbols. This is due to changes in Windows that occurred in the 8.1 release which made it so that the profiler from older versions of VS can't get the unique identifier that allows it to match a symbol file (PDB) with a binary.

More information at my blog post here.

This issue is unrelated to NGEN (which is what the post you linked to is about).

mandaleeka
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  • Seeing an opportunity for feedback here, *please* put the "visual" back in the profiler. There's just no way that any customer of yours is going to be happy with a report like this with no chance at all to find out what went wrong. Take a cue from the "Symbol load information" command in the Modules debugger window. – Hans Passant Apr 12 '14 at 10:51
  • Installing the latest update didn't cross my mind at all. Thank you @mandaleeka ! – Halil Apr 13 '14 at 11:34