In this post, we will continue our journey into the functionality and implementation of dotnet.exe, specifically focusing on how the hostfxr library is resolved and loaded. This post follows part one of this series, “A Brief Introduction to the .NET Muxer (aka dotnet.exe)“. Note: These posts are a deep dive into .NET internals and won’t […]
Category: .NET

A Brief Introduction to the .NET Muxer (aka dotnet.exe)
This post marks the start of what I expect will be a long-term effort to explore the inner workings of .NET, expose the “magic” behind the scenes, and explain the mechanisms and underlying components of the .NET execution model. Today, we begin with a brief introduction to the .NET muxer (dotnet.exe). Note: These posts are […]

Disabling Recording of an Activity (span) in .NET OpenTelemetry Instrumentation
I’ve recently been building some hobby code to dogfood the various observability tooling we develop at Elastic. Additionally, I’ve been interested in identifying the pain points of using our products as well as the .NET instrumentation libraries (from System.Diagnostics) used to instrument code in an OpenTelemetry-compatible way. Recording Activities in .NET In today’s short post, […]

Understanding System.Diagnostics DiagnosticSource and DiagnosticListener (Part 1)
Throughout its history, .NET has evolved various mechanisms to “log” diagnostic information inside applications and libraries, including TraceSource, EventSource, ILogger, and DiagnosticSource, the subject of this post. TraceSource is a legacy option and is rarely used in new code. ILogger is a simple structured logging abstraction that is well suited to many applications, although it […]

Profiling Memory Allocations on Linux using the JetBrains dotMemory Command-Line Profiler
In a previous post (Automating memory profiling with the JetBrains dotMemory Profiler API), I described the steps that could be used to automate the collection of memory snapshots and profiling data by using the JetBrains Profiler API NuGet package. In that post, we triggered the profiling session using the dotMemory application on Windows. As part […]