Discussion from runtime/issues/12506

[jzabroski]

dotnet/runtime#12506 (comment)

This article currently covers the verbose and (arguably, less common) way of using dotnet-trace to debug assembly loading issues, as most assembly loading issues likely occur when the generic IHostBuilder is initially called.

I debated rewriting the whole article to emphasize this use case, but I tempered that to simply get this documented with what I feel is the natural way to trace assembly loading events.

For the content, I elected to mostly use the docs @vitek-karas team has already written, here: https://github.com/dotnet/diagnostics/blob/main/documentation/dotnet-trace-instructions.md#using-dotnet-trace-to-launch-a-child-process-and-trace-it-from-startup

I realize copy-paste is not great, but I felt it was important to capture in this article the full flow of calling a new process. I also fixed some minor stuff like kbd escape tags.

Summary

Describe your changes here.

Fixes #Issue_Number (if available)

[gewarren]

Thanks for adding this.

[jzabroski]

@gewarren Thanks for all the great suggestions, I believe I addressed them.

[josalem]

Should this not just be a link to https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/diagnostics/dotnet-trace#launch-a-child-application-and-collect-a-trace-from-its-startup-using-dotnet-trace where this is already documented?

[jzabroski]

Should this not just be a link to https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/diagnostics/dotnet-trace#launch-a-child-application-and-collect-a-trace-from-its-startup-using-dotnet-trace where this is already documented?
-- @josalem

I personally see that people want a set of steps to solve a specific problem/use case, which is how to debug assembly loading failures. The content is just ever so slightly different and tailored to the specific problem. I volunteered this PR because I get a lot of .NET developers asking for help on this topic because they find .NET Core/.NET 5 assembly binding very confusing ever since auto-generated binding redirects feature was removed ex ante legacy .NET 4.8. I can't even exaggerate when I say a lot. It outweighs any other question I get in my open source projects by a factor of 100.

Thanks for asking.

[josalem]

CC @vitek-karas @elinor-fung for feedback on assembly loading

[vitek-karas]

Thanks a lot!

[gewarren]

Thanks for adding the link. I left a final few comments after looking at the preview of the article. Tip: you can batch the suggestions into one commit if you accept them on the "Files changed" tab of the PR.

[jzabroski]

@gewarren Thanks for the tip! I learned something new.