I love having test projects included in my solutions. Software is alive. I’m constantly making improvements/changes/fixes. When I have customers asking for various features in my code, or for code improvements, being agile and able to publish a changed build with utmost confidence relies...

  Sometimes your program wakes up and finds itself running in an environment that might not be as suitable as you’d like.   For example, it might be distributed to a user running on a machine with not enough memory, and could be failing. Perhaps the failures occur because the user is running...

  I was helping a colleague and we were deep in the middle of a debug session, single stepping some code and we wanted to see a value in the debugger. The debugger showed either nothing, because the intermediate value has been optimized out, or a message like “cannot display value, possibly because...

Often your code gets run on a machine far away and it’s useful to gather some information about that machine automatically, perhaps for error reporting or statistics gathering. This information could include the Operating System version, how much memory, logged in user, etc. There are...

When you run your VB or C# application, you might get an OutOfMemoryException thrown, even if your machine has lots of memory. Every 32 bit process has a 2^32 bit (4 Gig) address space. That means every pointer has a size of 32 bits (4 bytes) and thus is limited to 4 Billion. That’s...

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 is the basis of these allocations...

A few days ago, somebody came into my office and plopped down a box. It seemed very light. He said that it was a new PC. I thought hmmm…. The box seems empty…Why am I getting a new PC?. Apparently an inventory was made and my current hardware was at the lower end of the list. So I started up...