[teh_klev]

> Then you've done it wrong. Very, very wrong. You should be able to replicate your live environment locally and not being able to is a sign of a very broken development process.

I feel this is statement is a tad hyperbolic.

One of my key skill sets is debugging, I'm pretty good at it. One of the things we can't do is completely replicate a production environment because we're a web hoster. Sure I can run and test stuff against our OS "gold images" but when you've added third party client code running on 300-400 sites on a single server that environment is not reproducible without a herculean effort. We also don't have the luxury of time to "Keep trying to replicate it until you do. I'm talking days of trying".

Four or five times a year I need to dig out ADPlus, point it at a customer's worker process and tell it to snapshot and dump when certain conditions/triggers occur. I then whip said dump over to my WinDbg+SOS environment to find out what the hell was happening in the process when it went bad.