Developer Support Languages - VC++, C# and VB.NET

Troubleshooting side by side problems is not a challenging task unless you break the basic checks which are required to successfully run your application. These rules help you track the problem area in your application at the first stage. For more information...

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...

Let’s go back to the older days, when code sharing was an integral decision taken by application developers. Code sharing allowed developers to write efficient and light-weight applications with less memory utilization. Creating a shared component in...

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...

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...

When a managed application is built on Visual Studio , we get four options to choose for a platform .Lets discuss these options in detail . 1)x86 X86 is the generic name for all Intel x86 32 bit architectures. If you build your application using...

After migrating to Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and building the application, the manifest file of application and all the dependent DLL’s contain RTM version. In Visual Studio 2008 SP1, by design, the manifest for the created exe links it to the RTM version...

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...

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...

C++ code which contains an STL vector containing types derived from the_com_ptr_t COM smart pointer class and using the std:sort() function to sort interface pointers may give unexpected sort output._com_ptr_t COM smart pointer derived types are commonly...

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...

This article talks about marshaling structures using PInvoke which has a pointer to an array of another structure as a member. When calling native functions in a managed application, a frequent question that comes to mind is how to marshal a nested...

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...

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...

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...

Authenticode , also referred as a “ digital signature ” , is an industry standard of verifying the source of an application by setting up a trust relationship with the publisher of the application. However, digitally signing your managed application might...

Windows RT devices are now available so I thought I’d do a few posts on debugging tools for Windows Store apps on Windows RT and the ARM assembly generated with Visual Studio 2012 native (C++) tools. Understanding ARM assembly is a useful skill for debugging...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

This article focuses on troubleshooting a heap corruption caused by writing into the next allocated block. Heap corruption comes into notice when the overridden memory is accessed, leaving in a state where it becomes hard to figure out the original code...

Stack is one of the most widely understood data structures in computer science. It is a general purpose data structure and is a part of most of modern day computer architectures as well. In the context of a thread running in an executing process, “the...