Find references to the object in runtime

Question

I have an object, which lives forever. I am deleteing all references I can see, to it after using it, but it still not collected. Its life cycle is pretty sophisticated so I

Answer 1

I solved a similar issue with the SOS extension (which apparently does no longer work with Visual Studio 2013, but works fine with older versions of Visual Studio).

I used following code to get the address of the object for which I wanted to track references:

public static string GetAddress(object o)
{
    if (o == null)
    {
        return "00000000";
    }
    else
    {
        unsafe
        {
            System.TypedReference tr = __makeref(o);
            System.IntPtr ptr = **(System.IntPtr**) (&tr);
            return ptr.ToString ("X");
        }
    }
}

and then, in Visual Studio 2012 immediate window, while running in the debugger, type:

.load C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\sos.dll

which will load the SOS.dll extension.

You can then use GetAddress(x) to get the hexadecimal address of the object (for instance 8AB0CD40), and then use:

!do 8AB0CD40
!GCRoot -all 8AB0CD40

to dump the object and find all references to the object.

Just keep in mind that if the GC runs, it might change the address of the object.