Folks, it's Friday and I have an anecdote to share before I return to
today's coding fiasco. I'll just tell you what happened and try to avoid
making judgements, I'll leave that to you.
For about 4 years we've had an Azure hosted Web API/service driving a
moderately complex Blazor app and some other smaller clients. The service
hosted a C++ library that did the heavy lifting of generating
cross-tabulation reports. The trouble was, that the service would randomly
crash deep inside the C++ dll and it would leave no useful diagnostic
evidence, usually just a hint about some kind of memory access violation.
It would never crash in testing, only in Azure. I presume here is a way to
diagnose this sort of crash in Azure hosting, but you probably need the
minidump and symbol files out of the C++ compile, I'm not exactly sure, as
I just couldn't face the toil, and by great luck it was due for replacement
anyway. Some very large US companies were suffering from the crash
interruptions and there was a serious risk that we could lose their
business.
The lucky part is that the huge C++ codebase was already being rewritten in
C#, so we went into a frenzy of continued conversion and testing, and the
C# replacement is now about 90% rolled-out. and guess what?! ... The random
crashes are gone and one customer even sent us a message of thanks for the
new reliability.
We did have a few small unhandled exceptions, but I simply went to the
Azure portal logs and the stack trace pointed us straight to the problem
point. We could usually publish a fix within half an hour.
So years of random C++ crashes were completely cured by a C# rewrite.
*Greg K*
