You can learn all sorts of information about your application using Perfmon. You can also inspect various aspects of managed memory. How much time is spent in garbage collection? When managed code runs, memory management is done for you, but at the cost...

Writing WPF code is made easier in VB because of the built in XML features (XAML is really XML). Here is a sample that creates a TreeView of some folders on disk. Suppose we want to add a Trigger style that will fire when the mouse is over an item. We...

You can inspect the processes that run on your machine using Task Manager (Ctrl-Shift-Escape) or , Process Explorer from Sysinternals Or you can write your own: here’s source code: What is your computer doing with all that memory? Write your own...

In the old days of Basic (starting over 4 decades ago), there were functions called Peek and Poke that would allow you to read and write memory directly. These were incredibly powerful commands: you could, for example, read and write directly to the hardware...

When writing code in various languages, you’ll write functions from which you get a return value. Sometimes you’ll want to get 2 return values. A common way to handle this is to use parameters to pass a variable by reference that will get one of the return...

I wanted to inject some very low impact code that would run in any “parent” process, like Notepad or Excel or Visual Studio. I wanted to have some User Interface for the data that my injected code gathered about the parent process, and that would work...

Last time in Play around with .Net Dictionaries and STL maps , we talked about various containers. Today we’ll write our own allocator for a particular STL container. A general purpose allocator, like malloc in the C Runtime library or HeapAlloc in the...

Last time ( Adventures in interop code: explore string interop memory ) we investigated sharing memory between native and managed code, or between processes. Data structures are very useful: things like arrays, structures, lists, dictionaries, stacks...

In Create an ActiveX control using ATL that you can use from Fox, Excel, VB6, VB.Net , I showed how to create a control (with which the user can interact) which can be hosted in many places. Today’s sample creates a class in C++ that doesn’t necessarily...

You can make your Visual Studio experience faster. Often you write some code in Visual Studio, hit F5 to test the code. Repeat. Here’s a simple way to make this experience faster. (works with managed, native, mixed code). When a process is started from...

Some code is always added to your VB project. Try this: Start VS (2008 or 2010 beta: the numbers below are for 2008) File->New->Project->VB->Console App. Build->Build Solution. (I like to use temporary projects: see Use temporary projects...

What is your computer doing with all that memory? There are various kinds of memory allocated and used in each process. These include: · Managed memory (VB.Net, C#, managed C++) · Heap memory · Stacks · Images (files loaded into a process) VirtualAlloc...

In this post Examine .Net Memory Leaks I showed how to find a .Net managed memory leak. Now let’s create a graph of memory and resource use over time. Start Visual Studio 2008, File->New->Visual Basic (or C#) Windows, WPF application. Dbl click...

One of the best features of Windows is the ability to Cut and Paste data within an application or from one application to another. You can alt-tab or click on the task bar to switch between actively running applications, like Word and Visual Studio. When...

Process Explorer and Process Monitor are must-have free utilities that you can download from http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb795533.aspx For example you can use ProcExp to examine a particular behavior of Visual Studio. Start Visual...

How do you find out why your computer or a running program is so slow? Here’s one way. Let’s attach the VS debugger to VS itself. The main executable for VS is devenv.exe. Start Visual Studio 2008. This will be the “debugger” Choose File->Open Project...

In the last post, Area fill algorithm: crayons and coloring book , I showed a program that emulates a kid drawing in a coloring book. However, the algorithm wasn’t very efficient, and would explode even if you had a simple drawing: it was using the stack...

Kids know how to use crayons and a coloring book. How do you write such a program? In my last post ( Which pixels do you turn on when you draw a line? ) I showed how to draw a line. Now suppose you have some lines or shapes already drawn. How would you...

When I wrote my cartoon animation program almost 30 years ago (see Cartoon animation program ) I needed to know how to draw a line. Of course, nowadays, we just call a library function that will draw a line given two points. If you think about it, the...

In a typical day, I write or debug programs in several languages: typically Foxpro, C#, VB, C++ and 32 bit assembly, with an occasional MSIL, IDL and 64 bit ASM thrown in. Sometimes, I like to switch between one version of code and another. This is useful...

Several years ago, my wife and I were walking through a local shopping mall. At the time, there was some sort of Asian festival. At a display booth there was a table upon which were two trays, side by side. One was empty, and the other had many beans...

A cartoon can be thought of as a series of drawings. To simulate movement, the drawings can be slightly different from each other. Remember drawing simple cartoons using a pad of paper? Simply flipping through the pages made the drawings come to life...

There are various leak detection methods for memory allocators. A popular one is to tag each allocation with some information about the caller. When there’s a memory leak, you just need to look at that tag info to find the line of code that allocated...

Much of my time is spent using the Visual Studio debugger examining code to figure out how it works and how to fix it. When stepping through a function, the values the function uses are very useful for code understanding. The debugger shows these values...

Suppose you have some old code lying around that creates a Win32 window with an HWnd (perhaps ATL , MFC , or just C/ C++). For example, if you type some erroneous code into a VB application in Visual Studio: Dim x=4: catch ex As Exception The “Exception...