Question

does anyone know some generic computer or/and application diagnostic tools for .NET applications?

For example a applications doesn’t start on the computer of a customer. He can run the diagnostics tool which does some simple checks like:

• Which .NET Framework Versions are installed?
• Is the installed .NET Framework version valid (or maybe brocken)?
• …

Never seen something like this for .NET specific applications.

Answer 1

There’s no single tool that I know of, but here’s a handful of ones that I’ve used:

• For checking .NET installation, the best tool is probably Aaron Stebner’s .NET Framework Setup Verification.
• If your application is still failing to start, another tool to use is the Assembly Binding Log Viewer, which will tell you if, e.g., an expected third-party file in the GAC is missing.
• If you have instrumented your application for tracing, another good tool to have on hand is TechNet/Systems Internals DebugView. This one is particularly nice because you can turn tracing on and off just by modifying the .config (so it works well for debugging release code in a production environment). DebugView lets you observe traces live; there’s another tool called the Service Trace Viewer Tool that takes the same traces from an XML file and displays them all pretty (it says it’s for WCF, but it can be used with any XML trace file).