Whereas probes like Collected Delegate or Object Not Kept Alive catch coding mistakes in managed code, the Invalid IUnknown and Invalid VARIANT probes typically inform you when you're attempting to interoperate with a broken COM component. Either that...

The Object Not Kept Alive and Buffer Overrun probes are unlike any other CDPs, because they do not output any messages to report bugs in your code. Instead, they change general CLR behavior with the goal of forcing non-deterministic bugs that can be almost...

I'll be doing a book signing (for .NET and COM: The Complete Interoperability Guide ) at the TechEd Mall tomorrow (Wed. 6/4) from 11:30-12:30 - immediately after the Interop presentation.  If you're at TechEd, please stop by!

The most common mistake made when passing a delegate to unmanaged code (marshaled as a function pointer) is to allow the delegate to be garbage collected before unmanaged code is finished using it. This can happen because unmanaged code is invisible to...

Tomorrow morning I'm headed for Dallas, Texas to speak at TechEd 2003. Sonja Keserovic and I are giving the following talk: Interoperating with Unmanaged Code (DEV341) Room: D166 Time Slot: Wed, June 4 10:15 AM-11:30 AM Moving to the .NET Framework...

Defining a PInvoke signature and using DllImportAttribute correctly can be difficult to do, and you normally get little-to-no diagnostic information if you make a mistake. Some mistakes that can be made with PInvoke would be impossible for the CLR to...

I've fixed this posting, so read on!

As promised, here's my first entry with more details about Customer Debug Probes and CLR SPY. The Marshaling probe is the easiest one to understand and great for experimentation since it's the only one that doesn't report on error/warning conditions...

Version 1.1 of the .NET Framework introduces a handy feature called Customer Debug Probes (CDP). These probes enable you to find and diagnose difficult bugs lurking in managed code, even in a production environment. I'll share the details of each probe...