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". Unfortunately, one of the downsides...

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 Debugger in Visual Studio 2010 (Part I) An...

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 application, you can have the Historical Debugger...

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 why a breakpoint doesn't work correctly (we're...

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 a 64-bit dump file (or process). As a result, the...

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 methods that are not called from any other code (CA1811...

As early as Visual Studio 2002, Visual Studio has supported the ability to see the dependencies between projects in a solution. However, the experience is somewhat clunky in that you can only see the dependencies one project at a time. In the example below, you can see the project dependencies for the...

Software quality is a subject that is near and dear to my heart. At PDC 2009 this year, there is full day workshop on how to use Visual Studio Team System 2010 to develop high quality software . I'm really excited about this workshop since it covers a lot of the features that my team works on including...

In a previous blog , I covered how to debug a LINQ to SQL query using the Historical Debugger. In this blog, I'll discuss using the Historical Debugger to debug an exception. The are a couple of reasons why the Historical Debugger is so useful when it comes to debugging exceptions: If your application...

Formatting strings is a very common task in .NET development. Examples include formatting dates and currencies, composing a HTML response, creating error messages, etc. One of the downsides of string formatting is that if done incorrectly, you can end up with subtle bugs that won't be detected until...

Last weekend, I spent a good 30 minutes trying to figure out why I wasn't hitting a breakpoint in a method. Admittedly, I wasn't very familiar with the code since I hadn't written it. It turned out that the method wasn't being called from anywhere, so it was essentially "dead code". I wanted...

One of the questions that comes up regularly on newsgroups is "How do I skip over a section of my code in the Visual Studio debugger?" The answer depends on the meaning of the word "skip" but in general, there are three ways that you can skip over a section of code in the debugger...

One of the new features that we have added in Visual Studio Team System 2010 is the ability to create a new UML Sequence Diagram as well as generate one from existing code. I'm not going to go into too much detail on what a UML sequence diagram is since there is a plethora of information about the subject...

In Visual Studio Team System 2010, one of the new features that we have added to the Profiler is the ability to measure the performance of JScript code that runs in the browser. This means that if you have a web application that contains ASP.NET AJAX or plain old JScript, you can now measure how long...

In a recent Channel 9 10-4 video, Brian Keller introduced the Historical Debugger in Visual Studio Team System 2010. One of the features that he described in his video was the Historical Debugger Navigation Bar (Navbar) which he used to step back in the application. In this post, I'm going to describe...

Sample code is great because it allows you to quickly get up to speed with a new technology or learn how an API works and sometimes, you might even use some of the code in your own application. The major downside of reusing sample code is that most often, the code wasn't written with production quality...

I've covered the Visual Studio 2010 Historical Debugger extensively in a few of the previous posts. In this post, I'll cover how the Historical Debugger makes debugging LINQ to SQL queries a lot more convenient. If you are trying to debug a LINQ to SQL query, often it helps to look at the generated T...

One of the new features that we've added to the Visual Studio 2010 debugger is the ability to manage breakpoints more effectively. You might say that the existing Breakpoints window is a fine tool for being able to manage your breakpoints. After all, you can create, modify and delete breakpoints using...

In an earlier blog , I described how to use the new WPF Visualizer to debug WPF applications in Visual Studio 2010. We've added another feature that further improves the debugging experience for WPF applications. The Visual Studio 2010 debugger can now automatically display tracing information from a...

Prior to Team System 2010, if you try to profile an application on a virtual machine (e.g. Virtual PC, Hyper-V, VMWare) using sampling mode, this is the error that you will see: Unfortunately, if you want to use sampling mode, you're pretty much stuck! The only "workaround" is to profile your...

This should make many C/C++ developers happy when Visual Studio 2010 becomes available (you can download Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 right now). In previous versions of Visual Studio, one of the complains that we've received is that developers want to use string manipulation functions like strcmp() and...

There are numerous articles on the web that describe the perils of SQL Injection attacks and warn developers about the fact that "All Input is Evil!". If you are interested in reading more about what a SQL Injection attack is, Wikipedia has a pretty good introduction to the subject . There...

In Visual Studio Team System 2010, we've made a huge number of improvements to the Profiler. In case you didn't know that Visual Studio Team System has a Profiler, see the documentation on MSDN. One of the major improvements that we have made to the Profiler is the ability to measure how long the interaction...

There are numerous ways to view variables in the Visual Studio debugger. You can use the Autos window, Locals window, Quick Watch, four different Watch windows, etc. In Visual Studio 2010, we've made it even easier to see the value of variables. Over the years, we've conducted countless usability studies...