Question

On the project I am working on at the moment we have an unknown number of flickering tests which fail at varying rates (anywhere from every-other run to once every 5000 runs) which has led us to believe we have some serious Heisenbugs to resolve. Most of the time including trace statements in the code change the timing enough to eliminate these errors, or at least make them occur less often, but obviously this is not a valid bug fix.

We are wondering if there are any tools similair to CHESS (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/chess/download.aspx) that work in/with Visual Studio 2010 to stress test applications and detect potential race conditions and deadlocks?

Answer 1

Within Visual Studio 2010 (not sure which editions exactly) you can create a new profiling session with the “Concurrency” option. This should detect the deadlocks you’re looking for. You can then profile a unit test to automate your many runs.

Couldn’t find many images of the results but here’s an example
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