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Thursday, August 31, 2006 8:55 PM

See my early work: X-Debug from 1992

I recently discovered a floppy containing the source to a program I wrote in 1992: X-Debug, a debugger for the Atari ST. Coincidentally I also received an email via this blog from someone asking if I had the source and rights to the Atari version of HiSoft
Posted by andypennell | 7 Comments
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Friday, July 21, 2006 10:05 AM

Detecting over-Releasing on COM objects

I am in Refcount Hell right now, trying to fix a new chunk of our codebase for COM refcounting issues. Debugging missing AddRefs consumes most of my time, and I might write about that one day, but yesterday I managed to over-Release an object and of course
Posted by andypennell | 2 Comments
Tuesday, March 28, 2006 10:22 AM

Autoexp.dat not working in Visual Studio 2005?

As this was reported twice in the space of a week internally, I figured that external users may be hitting this too. The internal emails were along the lines of "I added my custom types to autoexp.dat and they don't work". In both cases this was because
Posted by andypennell | 10 Comments
Tuesday, March 21, 2006 3:57 PM

Displaying DirectX Errors in the Debugger

Debugging DirectX calls that fail is a pain as the debugger cannot show the "nice" HRESULT codes as it does for COM errors (such as E_NOTIMPL). However you can tell the debugger about the custom error codes and add them to the [hresult] section of autoexp.dat.
Posted by andypennell | 0 Comments
Friday, December 09, 2005 5:18 PM

What does "pdb is obsolete" really mean?

If your Visual Studio debugger says this to you, it either means Your PDB really is obsolete Your debugger is obsolete 1. It gets expensive in terms of testing and (sometimes) development to read every single old PDB format, so with each release the C++
Posted by andypennell | 7 Comments
Tuesday, September 06, 2005 10:15 AM

10 Years at Microsoft

I started at Microsoft the day after Labour Day, 1995 (which I soon learned was spelled Labor Day). This was about a week after the Windows 95 launch , so things were still pretty crazy on campus. It took years for the football (er, soccer) fields to
Posted by andypennell | 1 Comments
Monday, February 21, 2005 1:57 PM

Does anyone use dbgclr? Or even know what it is?

My third blog entry in a row which is a question, and its becease we really want your input on these things. Do you use dbgclr? If you dont even know what it is, then the answer is clearly no. For those folks, dbgclr is a GUI managed debugger that ships
Posted by andypennell | 16 Comments
Thursday, February 10, 2005 10:47 AM

Six Year Old MS Debugger better than current Open Source debuggers?

There is an interesting post on a Firefox developers blog that describes how great the VC6 debugger still is, despite being almost six years old, chiding the open source folks for still not competing with it. We should be flattered I guess. Although I
Posted by andypennell | 12 Comments
Wednesday, January 19, 2005 2:25 PM

We want to cut Crashdump support : will you let us?

See Scott's blog for why we want to cut "classic" W2K crashdump from the VS2005 Whidbey debugger. If you agree or disagree, please use the Feedback section on his blog to say why. I personally want to cut this too. Classic crashdumps are a bad file format,
Posted by andypennell | 4 Comments
Friday, October 15, 2004 5:42 PM

C# Edit and Continue is here!

Finally we have announced C# Edit and Continue, the 2nd most requested feature in all of VS (according to the Ladybug tool). The whole team across all the disciplines really pulled together to get it done. As a point of history you can read my original
Posted by andypennell | 6 Comments
Thursday, September 30, 2004 10:07 AM

Pointer to new debugger blog and Update

Mike Stall has a new blog which will be of interest to low-level folks wanting to know how the CLR debugging APIs really do their magic. These are the APIs that we (Visual Studio) use to debug managed code. You may have noticed the lack of blog content
Posted by andypennell | 0 Comments
Friday, August 20, 2004 1:20 PM

Windows XP SP2 and the Visual Studio Debugger

Oh what fun XP SP2 was for the debugger team! The firewall defaulting to On obviously completely broke Remote Debugging, and the DCOM changes broke it even more. Kept us busy for a long time. Well Gregg , mostly. The results are threefold: A new KB 841177
Posted by andypennell | 3 Comments
Wednesday, August 11, 2004 1:46 PM

Magic Tricks with DLL Forwarders

Thought I would share a DLL trick we used in the VS 2003 debugger that illustrates how a DLL with no real code or data can be very useful, especially if your exe is pretending to be something it is not. VS 2003 has the ability to load windbg extension
Posted by andypennell | 1 Comments
Monday, July 12, 2004 10:40 AM

Developer Job Opening: Visual Studio Debugger

We have a developer position open on the debugger team, you can read more about it at http://www.microsoft.com/careers/search/details.aspx?JobID=9f4b66b0-c5bc-422e-ac63-5b1d8c0c0006 If you are interested in applying, please contact HR via the web site
Posted by andypennell | 0 Comments
Tuesday, June 29, 2004 11:24 AM

Debugger Goodies in VS 2005 Beta 1

Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 is announced at last! Previously known as Whidbey (and internally it will forever known as Whidbey, as 7.1 is forever Everett, as 7.0 is, er, 7.0) this beta is going to be available to MSDN Universal subscribers, and some other
Posted by andypennell | 23 Comments
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