The DLL Hell of Windows Containers: Debugging "Silent" Failures

In our previous posts, we talked about some techniques to dramatically lower your final image size, the experience working with Windows Containers, and why it was the most viable bridge to the cloud when trying to modernize your applications (.NET Framework). Today, we're moving from the theory of "Lift and Shift" and diving into how to solve the "it works on my machine" nightmare. If you've spent any time with Windows Containers, you know how it feels when you run docker build, it finishes successfully, then you run docker run, and... nothing. The container exits immediately. No stack trace, no event log, just a Exit Code 1. Debugging these type of errors require moving from the basic Docker commands and diving into the internals of the Windows kernel and subsystem. The Entrypoint Trap When a Windows Container crashes on startup, the logs are often lost because the container object is destroyed before the buffer flushes. To fix this, you must hijack the entrypoint. Instead of letting