Get Memory Address of .NET Object (C#)

Question

I am trying to track down a bug in the mono runtime where a variable appears to be allocated to one valid object, and then is reassigned later to a bogus object, specificall

Answer 1

You can't get the address of a manged object in managed code, in general. If the object has a field like an int, you could take it's address with the fixed C# statement and then you'd have a pointer inside the object. For debugging purposes, you could make some assumptions and get the offset to the base pointer of the object (on 32 bit platforms the object header size on mono is 8 bytes, 16 bytes on 64 bit architectures, at this time).

Your bug report claims you're using the Boehm collector, though, and that collector doesn't move objects in memory, the bug could be caused by some unrelated memory corruption, by the object being incorrectly freed or some other logic bug in the GC (I'm not sure the zero size you pointed out is relevant, since a managed object has at least the 8-16 byte header).