C#/.NET analysis tool to find race conditions/deadlocks

Question

Is there a tool that analyses .NET code and finds race conditions?

I have a bit of code that has a public static property that gets or creates a private static field. It also has a public static method that sets this field to null (...yes, I know!..)

As there are no locks around either of these methods, it's a safe bet that things'll go horribly wrong in the future. I need a tool that'll recursively go through things that call either of these methods and see if anything was spawned on another thread.

I'm looking for a tool or perhaps an nDepend SQL script (if this is possible).

Answer 1

You're probably looking for one of these:

• CHESS
• Typemock Racer

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NOTE: This answer is from 2010. As with all recommendations answers, recommendations tend to change over time. There may be other products out there now, CHESS which was a Microsoft Research Labs project may have evolved into a final product or been scrapped altogether. Please take this answer with a grain of salt and conduct new research into which products are suitable now.

Answer 2

Jinx will do this at runtime (not statically) but it may be worth looking at.

Answer 3

I have been experimenting on how to easily track those. I've been working to track some deadlocks, specially on scenarios where many different lock statements are used.

My goal is to detect deadlocks before they happen, e.g. if you have two resources, you know you have to always use them in the same order, otherwise a deadlock might occur.

lock (lockObj1) 
lock (lockObj2) 
{ 
    // some code
} 

... somewhere else in the app ...

lock (lockObj2) 
lock (lockObj1) // <- I expect some "possible deadlock" detection here 
{ 
    // some code
} 

In this case I'm using lockObj1 then lockObj2 in one place and using them in the opposite order in another place, this is something you will like to avoid in an application Of course, lock statements don't need to be used one after the other like in the example, your complex application might have several complex objects interacting with each other

I have uploaded the code with the test cases here https://github.com/glmnet/LockTracer

Answer 4

You might want to check out CHESS.

Answer 5

See the answers here: What static analysis tools are available for C#?

Some static analysis tools can do deadlock detection.

Also, try FxCop from Microsoft.

Answer 6

Have you looked at Red-Gate Ants? I'm not sure if it will do everything you need but it is a good product to:

• Identify performance bottlenecks within minutes
• Optimize .NET application performance
• Drill down to slow lines of code with line-level timings
• Profile aspx, ASP.NET, C# code, and VB.NET applications