greggm's WebLog

One of the error codes that we included in the VS.NET 2002 and 2003 debuggers is: The debugger is not properly installed. Run setup to install or repair the debugger. Diagnosing this is much harder then it should be (more on this later). For now lets...

There are times that you need to debug the startup code for an application, but something else is launching the application. Classic examples might be services or setup custom actions. Luckily, the OS team came up with a way to debug these problems: ...

The debugger team has gotten many requests to debug ASP.NET applications as a non-admin. In Whidbey, the ASP.NET team did a good job solving this problem. Their solution is much nicer then mine. In the mean time, here is a way that you can get this scenario...

In native code, its sometimes useful to set a breakpoint condition so that a breakpoint will only stop for a particular instance of an object. To do this, I simply use the address of the object: this == (CMyObject*)0x10fc10 In managed code, the...

Today I want to try to give more insight into the 'Binding Handle Is Invalid' problem that a number of people have reported with the VS 2005 debugger. First, if all you care about is how to solve the problem: Enable the 'Terminal Services' service...

The Visual Studio debugger supports debugging both .NET code and native code at the same time. We call this ‘interop’. At first glance, this might not seem like much of an accomplishment. After all, we support debugging .NET code well enough...

First, some background. The way we start ASP.NET debugging is to send a special request to ASP.NET over HTTP/HTTPS. The verb for this request is 'DEBUG'. If everything goes as planned, this allows VS to know what process to attach to. Displaying error...

The debugger has a new feature this time around called 'Just my code'. This is a new-for-Whidbey managed debugging feature. Philosophy of Just my code: The basic idea is that when you debug an application, you want to debug the code in the application...

For a long time now, security people have been advocating running as a non-administrator. I have tried this a few times myself, generally for about 10 minutes before I give up. On my home computer, I once changed my account and my wife’s account...

I am constantly using remote debugging. I have one ‘development’ machine. On this machine, I have Visual Studio 2005 and an environment setup to build whatever version of VS I want. Then I have a bunch of test machines which run debug versions...

As I am sure everyone reading this article knows, the CLR support 'properties', which is a way of making function calls look like a variable read or write. These have some problems for debuggers, mostly because in order to evaluate a property, the debugger...

In http://blogs.msdn.com/shaykatc/archive/2004/04/19/116222.aspx , Shaykat gave one alternative to the ntsd '-pn' option. I figured I would give two more. Alternative #1 - Attach project. Open the exe as a project (File->Open->Project, then select...

Usually, people put breakpoints on an instruction. These breakpoints are set by replacing the first byte of an instruction with the ‘int 3’ instruction (0xcc). When the processor executes the ‘int 3’ instruction, it causes the...

Soon we will get the remote debugger KB article fixed, and this blog will be useless. In the mean time… Basic steps to get remote debugging to work after installing XP SP2: Configure DCOM on the Visual Studio computer Configure Windows Firewall on both...

I have spent the last three weeks working from Lincoln Nebraska, where my wife is in school. In fact, I am typing this from my plane back home. I decided that it might be interesting to talk about my experiences working remotely. First, I would like to...

Joel, of Joel on software wrote an interesting blog ( Making Wrong Code Look Wrong ) last week that I just found time to read. I would largely agree with him. Really quick summary: he argues for variable prefixes to prevent accidentally doing the wrong...

Visual Studio 2008 shipped with a feature to automatically enable script debugging when starting IE8 from Visual Studio. In other words, if you are using VS 2008 and IE8, there is no longer a need to tweak IE options to debug your site. However, this...

There is a crash that can occur when you start debugging with Whidbey Beta 2 on a machine that still has remnants of Whidbey Beta 1. Judging from Visual Studio Error Reporting, quite a few people have hit into this. The problem. The debugger...

If you ever try to debug a multi-threaded Windows Forms application, today's blog is for you. A customer asked me about this issue, and since I have also run into this problem, I decided to talk about it. What is func eval? If you already...

This blog has been on my todo list forever. I am now sitting in an airport, so I guess it is time for the procrastination is over… I want to talk about remote debugging in the following network situations: Two domains without two-way trust Two computers...

Today I wanted to talk about my strangest contribution to the Whidbey debugger is a new pseudo-register -- $user. What is $user? First, I guess I should define what a pseudo-register is. Pseudo-registers are fake variables that can be evaluated in any...

Retail code debugging is one of those necessary evils. It's difficult, but the only way to completely avoid it is to not have retail code, which unfortunately usually requires you to avoid having any customers. Anyway, I figured I would give a brief tour...

Clearing up confusion over the proposed crashdump cut. As I posted in my last blog, Scott is soliciting feedback about a proposal to cut support for an old dump format. There has been some confusion over this, so I wanted to throw in my two cents. Crashdumps...

One thing that I fail to understand is why, in 2004, we still have code that uses strcat, strcpy, sprintf or any of the other string functions that don’t take a buffer size input. Microsoft, Open source, etc all still use these functions. Why? Can...

We occasionally get requests for the ability to break when a module loads. WinDbg (the other debugger that Microsoft produces) exposes this as an exception (see the 'sx' command), although it isn't really an exception. Ideally, I think this should be...