dynamic LINQ queries on live object graph without breakpoints - OLAP on runtime instances

Question

In short

Looking for live views or a "debugger" that takes dynamic live snapshots of my running code without pausing production functionality - any tools, libraries or half-implementations out there?

In detail - Dolphins.Any() or foreach .IsHerbivore etc

I have a rich runtime object eco-system and I would like to take snapshots of its state at times.

The traditional way to extract such property information from my application would be to do some kind of pre-set logging. However, I would like to avoid predefining my particular interests regarding my application states and instead run live dynamic queries on the instantiated object graph itself, not on any database, and without disrupting the production system. And I do not want to log everything, I would like to interact with selective aspects of the live environment.

The features I am looking to apply on my live source are nicely summarised by OLAP software, which enables users to analyze multidimensional data interactively from multiple perspectives. OLAP consists of three basic analytical operations: consolidation (roll-up), drill-down, and slicing and dicing.

Obviously, desiring a full OLAP-suite to work on live code is a dead-end today, so the question boils down to if there any products out there that yield some of this Google Analytics type-of functionality on runtime objects' states?

• My main interest for the moment is to be able to watch live code with runtime queries, while pretty visualizations and graphs are of lower priority.

• Unfortunately Visual Studio debugger does not let you pause a single thread while leaving others running, which would have allowed access to runtime objects and perhaps using the Immediate window as a rudimentary way of aggregating runtime object model data.

Answer 1

I'm not sure I fully understand what you are looking for, but I would advise you to look into this: .NET Crash Dump and Live Process Inspection