We had a customer who had issues with autoexp.dat. He added few data visualizers in autoexp.dat file but somehow none of them took effect in the debugger windows like Autos, Locals, etc. We initially thought the issue is with the way he gave format specifier...

There are several scenarios where a program including .NET applications perform a huge amount of floating point operations. In .NET Applications, operations like adding floating point numbers, Double.Equals() , etc. are good examples of floating point...

You create a sample MFC feature pack based SDI/MDI application with context sensitive help support. However, the context sensitive help may not work with submenu items. This blog attempts to get this working.   Figure 1: Context sensitive help for...

When you use the Reflection.Emit classes to generate a dynamic assembly, the targeted framework for the assembly will be the version of the framework under which you are running the code that generates the dynamic assembly. For instance, you can create...

Sometime back we saw an odd behavior in which C++ class data members were not getting correctly initialized due to memory corruption. It was discovered that this memory corruption was due to an unbalanced #pragma pack data alignment. In our case, this...

In Visual Studio 2010, if you are debugging a native executable which in turn loads a managed DLL built against a version of the framework previous to version 4, you may find that breakpoints which are set in the managed code are not hit. The breakpoints...

When building a project in Visual Studio 2010 that contains a .resx file, you may receive the following build error: The "GenerateResource" task failed unexpectedly. System.DllNotFoundException: Unable to load DLL 'FileTracker.dll': A dynamic link...

A developer’s life becomes a lot easier by using configuration files. Configuration files, being XML files, can be changed as needed and developers can use configuration files to change settings without recompiling applications. Administrators can use...

1. Introduction 2. How it works : a. Events and Call Information b. Recordings - iTrace file c. Capturing Events d. Specify modules e. Intellitrace Window f. Navigation Bar g. Running the trace file 3. Tips...

Background A VC++ application will fail to run if the required Visual C++ runtime libraries are not present on the target operating system (machine). It’s the manifest of the executable used by the operating system loader to load assemblies that...

MFC Feature pack application makes it possible to mimic the look and feel of office and outlook, however, when it comes to customization, well, one has to make a few changes to the application to get the desired result. Problem I came across...

When BCGSoft created the classes that Microsoft incorporated as the “MFC Feature Pack” in VS 2008 (and included in SP1), it seems their primary intent was to provide a nearly hands-free implementation of several popularly-requested user interface features...

GSCookie helps in finding buffer overrun cases on the stack and terminates the application when this is detected. In the .NET environment this would happen when calling into a native function when the function overrides the buffer on the stack corrupting...

In this article we will be talking about MFC Module state and Thread state , and how do we troubleshoot issues related to Module state mismatch. Why MFC dll does needs a module-specific state? Well reason is MFC is a shared dll, it needs to be shared...

Computers are not intuitive; they can predict the future perhaps, but they cannot paint magic doors through the boundaries of traditional logic - at least not yet. Imagine, if you will, a cup-stacking champion during his or her early life. How does one...

In this blog I am going to talk about Marshal.StructuretoPtr , especially its last parameter fDeleteOld. Although its msdn description is pretty concise but I have seen it to be a source of confusion a lot of times. Following is what it says: fDeleteOld...

This is one of the interesting scenario in which an unmanaged application built with Non-Microsoft technology was crashing during application shutdown with BOOTUP_EXCEPTION_COMPLUS exception (c0020001). This unmanaged application happened to be using...

1. How do I know which dll/control needs to be rebuilt? Please check the guidelines to understand if your dll/control could be affected or not. Installing the Visual Studio ATL Security patch and rebuilding the binaries alone will not mitigate the...

Most of the developers work with CToolBarCtrl but they get stuck when it comes to display chevron button. This article is all about how to get chevron button displayed on CToolBarCtrl control while resizing its content window. There is a good MSDN...

Internal Mechanism Internally the Visual Studio IDE interacts with editor and the language parsers to create a list of tokens that are updated frequently. In this process the background threads continuously update the Intellisense database. The priority...

Suppose you are calling some native code from your managed code, and you observe an Access Violation crash soon after returning from the native code inside your managed code. if you run the application inside the Visual Studio debugger you will see the...

I am back with some more PInvoke Stuff. Recently I was working on a PInvoke issue which I found interesting. I have a C++ dll which has a function whose signature is int TestFunc(IN_STRUCT in_Params, RET_STRUCT * pret_Par). I wanted to call this...

Recently I worked with one of my colleague on an interesting scenario in which the MFC application was crashing on startup. The next step was to run the application under WinDbg. After running the application under WinDbg we saw that we are actually access...

Recently, we came across a very interesting issue. A purely native application written in C++ was failing with "Not a valid win32 application" error at the startup on Windows XP machine. There are a few basic checks that we do to troubleshoot this...

In native world, one interacts with OS directly by calling Win32 APIs for managing resources (like allocating/deallocating memory,opening/closing handles). In managed world one relies on CLR totally or at times partially for doing the same( eg GC does...