.NET application hangs and I can't debug it

Question

I'm working on a multithreaded C# server for Syslog. I'm trying to perform a long-running experiment, but I found that after one hour the server hangs (after a certain time, logging stops).

I tried then to run it in Debug mode in Visual Studio and when I found it hanging and tried to press Pause in order to get useful information on where the threads were, Visual Studio said that Remote Debugging Monitor crashed. It's a local application.

What can I do to pause the process and get useful information about thread status?

Answer 1

Managed stack explorer will poll a managed application and log what is currently happening.

This article may also be useful (section about hang mode dump), but will require debugging a crash dump file (WinDbg is not as easy to absorb as Visual Studio and will take some time to learn).