I suspect I am having issues with deadlocks.  One of our .NET applications gets a timeout error after attempting, and then re-attempting an inline update statement.  Ive seen this sort of problem before and it was another process that was doing a long running job against one of the same tables.

Now the problem is I cant tell when this will occur again, nor do I know what other process might be doing this.

What I do know is the specific table that our application is trying to do the update against.

What is a good way to find out more details when this happens? I need enough info to trace it back to the application that is doing it.

There are some way to capture dead locks in sql server.

1. Extended Events

2. Sql Trace & Sql Profilers.

I suggest reading below urls help you.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sqlserverfaq/archive/2013/04/27/an-in-depth-look-at-sql-server-memory-part-2.aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms190465.aspx

http://rical.blogspot.com/2013/03/capturing-deadlock-in-sql-server-with-system-health-and-event-notification.html

http://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertutorial/252/tracing-a-sql-server-deadlock/

Yes, thank you!  I was just searching Bing and ran across some discussions of using profiler.  Thats what im going to try.

There is quite a bit you can do with profiler.

You can try TraceOn or the -T command-line startup option.  Flag 1222 provides information about deadlocks.

DBCC TraceOn(1222, -1)

Well dang it, I had a trace going that included deadlock events, and when I got this error again, the trace didnt catch anything.  So maybe its not a deadlock issue afterall?

Time to modify the error handling to get more details.