Like many folks, after watching the BUILD keynote this morning, I couldn't wait to get home and install Windows 8 Developer Preview on my laptop. The instructions for installing Windows 8 are simple enough. The only fly in the ointment is that installing...

Quite often, one or more developers need to collaborate on a bug to figure out the root cause of the problem. This collaboration is typically done using tools like email, bug tracking system (e.g. TFS) or if the developers are collocated, they might work...

One of the key benefits of IntelliTrace is that it collects lots of useful information about your application which allows you to debug exactly what the application was doing when a problem occurred. With so much information, it's important to be able...

One of the easiest ways to understand what IntelliTrace is and what it does, is through a comparison between how most developers debug their application today vs. what IntelliTrace enables. In the figure below, the blue section labeled (1) shows one of...

I was talking to someone the other day and he asked me whether Visual Studio has a tool to count the lines of code in an application. It occurred to me that others might be interested in the answer so I decided to blog about it. There is a tool called...

During the last few months, I've been blogging extensively about a new Visual Studio 2010 feature called IntelliTrace (formerly known as the "Historical Debugger"). We are very excited about IntelliTrace and think that it's going to change how...

A few months ago, I blogged about how to view the return value of a C# or VB method in the Visual Studio debugger. As I explained in that blog post, the debugger does not support viewing the return value of a .NET method, so you have to apply a workaround...

When using IntelliTrace, you might run across the following error message in the IntelliTrace window: IntelliTrace is not available. See the Debugger Output window or the Windows Application Events Log. Below is a list of reasons why you might see the...

In my previous post Getting Started with Visual Studio 2010 IntelliTrace: Hello IntelliTrace! , I described how to use the new IntelliTrace feature in Visual Studio 2010 to debug an application. But there's more to IntelliTrace. IntelliTrace also allows...

One of the most talked about features in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 is IntelliTrace. In a nutshell, IntelliTrace allows a developer to record the application execution and play it back. Using IntelliTrace, a developer can do some cool things like step...

Over the last few months, I've blogged a fair amount about a new feature in Visual Studio 2010 called the Historical Debugger. With the announcement of Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 also comes a name change for the Historical Debugger. It is now called IntelliTrace...

One of the most popular features in the Visual Studio debugger is the ability to edit code during a debug session and have the changes apply without having to stop the debugger, recompile the application and then run the application to verify the changes...

Today represents a huge personal milestone. My car reached a 100,000 miles! There is nothing unique or special about my car except the license plate and the Visual Studio logo on the hood. Most of my friends refer to the car as RUNTIME (for obvious reasons...

If you have written managed code that uses a COM object, then you are probably familiar with System.__ComObject . When a COM object lacks a Runtime Callable Wrapper (RCW), the CLR provides a generic RCW which is an instance of the type "System.__ComObject"...

During the last couple of months, I've covered the Historical Debugger extensively. If you are interested in learning more about this new feature in Visual Studio 2010, the following blog entries should help you get started. An in depth look at the Historical...

In previous blogs, I have covered the Historical Debugger extensively and talked about many of the scenarios. In this post, I'll walk through another scenario where the Historical Debugger is very useful which is Load Testing. When loading testing an...

When debugging an application, there are times when you want the debugger to stop whenever any of the functions in a particular class are called. An example of this may be when you are trying to find out which object is calling your class. Of course,...

On the Visual Studio debugger team, one of the areas where we regularly receive feedback is when breakpoints don't work. Furthermore, some of the error messages that the debugger displays when a breakpoint fails are generic so it might be hard to diagnose...

One of the questions that comes up about debugging dump files is how to debug a dump file that was created from a 64-bit process. The reason why this question comes up is because Visual Studio itself is a 32-bit application and therefore, cannot debug...

Now that the DinnerNow.net 3.1 sample application has been released, I thought I'd share some information about the project to help developers learn more about DinnerNow.net and what they can expect after downloading it. The following table summarizes...

DinnerNow.net 3.1 follows in the footsteps of the 3.0 release of DinnerNow.net by adding support for new Microsoft operating systems and platforms. New in DinnerNow 3.1 is support for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. Also, DinnerNow 3.1 adds support...

On Windows Vista, to install IIS 7.0 from the command line, you can use a tool called the Windows Package Manager (Pkgmgr.exe) . For example, the command line for installing IIS 7. 0 on Windows Vista might look something like the following depending on...

When you try to install Windows Mobile Device Center 6.1 (drvupdate-amd64.exe) on Windows Server 2008 R2, you'll probably end up with the following cryptic error message which isn't very helpful: Windows Mobile Device Center Driver Update -----------...

In a previous post , I explained how to use Code Analysis in Visual Studio 2010 to detect dead code. In that post, I described the following five Code Analysis rules in detail and how these set of rules form the basis for detecting dead code: Private...

As 64-bit machines become mainstream, one of the problems that developers run into is dealing with registry keys and directories. This is because many applications and runtimes are designed to run on both 64-bit and WOW64 . The problem comes about because...