A new tool has been developed to help detect and identify stability issues in real time. This proactive debugging is a change from traditional thinking where you run the device down and try to determine the root cause, often long after the original problem...

To increase Hopper awareness and help prove how simple Hopper really is, I have developed a bare-bones sample that embodies the essence of Hopper. My main motivation for sharing this tool is to provide a simplified, Hopper-like tool for our general Windows...

I am asked frequently if it is possible to reproduce Hopper runs – and the answer is a resounding “sort of”. The desire for this feature is logical: you have a recurring exception that happens after approximately 10 hours of Hopper and you want to set...

I'm sure many of you have been in a situation where your device hangs during field testing. Or sometimes you are trying to track down a problem which only repros at a certain location. The best thing you can have in these situations is, of course, a live...

AppVerifier is a very useful tool when it comes to finding memory leaks. It is relatively easy to configure if you have some understanding of how AKU's and PB work. There are pretty comprehensive instructions on MSDN found here . However if you need to...

Old news for some, but for the newer folks there is over 4 hours of Hopper video training done for the LTK rollout last spring. Topics include general Hopper strategy as well as diagnosing stability problems with debug devices as well as retail, stand...

Virtual Memory changes included in Windows Mobile 6.1 can relocate read- only code sections out of Slot 0 and into a higher address range. This change was taken to relieve pressure from our coveted, read- write Slot 0. This change will be transparent...

Contributed by Javier Flores Assad (AKA "MTTF Dude") The normal (by default) KD trap mechanism is the part of the kernel that triggers a break into the debugger when an exception is thrown. Sometimes you are not interested in some exceptions and...

Contributed by Javier Flores Assad (AKA "MTTF Dude") A little bit about SqlCE SQL CE is a very powerful component that is basically responsible for all the “Database” related operations, every time you mount, unmount, open or close a database...

From guest contributor Joe Broxson: In a previous blog, the Hopper Doctor wrote about "cutting the cord" and relying on Dr Watson to capture application dumps. This is a great idea, but one of the problems you may encounter is that hopper can disable...

Hopper is designed to monitor the overall health of the device and will only concern itself with exceptions that affect overall system stability. Knowing what exceptions are critical to stability and which are annoying comes from lots of experience and...

Interesting post over at "Reed & Steve" regarding Hopper and full screen apps and the Start Menu Dead message. Check it out here . Kudos to them for making this available.

I don't know how many times I wished Platform Builder had an option to load PDB files with timestamps that do not match my executable. This option was available for desktop users for decades. Windbg and other desktop debuggers can do it without problems...

PocketPC devices save a significant amount of power by dropping into a suspend state, which is almost the same as being completely off. Unfortunately, it’s possible for a driver to crash or hang in the suspend/resume path, which causes the device to become...

A large part of diagnosing Hopper issues is trying new things. I always encourage calculated change to see how change may affect your Hopper outcomes. Often however, what you think might be an updated executable is actually just a rebuilt version of the...

Problem: Hopper gets stuck in Welcome.exe at the Cut & Paste demo screen and cannot continue. Applies To: PPC & PPC PE devices only. Description: There is no mechanism to prevent Hopper from launching File Explorer on your PPC device. Once...

I was debugging a weird hang at device boot and I used the command “meminfo kernel” in CeDebugX to get more info, but I realized right away that I didn’t know what this command was showing me. So, I did a bit of investigation into what the output meant...

Several of our account managers were out and about with some free time on their digits… Contest: If you can identify the owner of the hands in this picture, I will send you official JDP Silly-putty that will help mute Hopper runs (while supplies...

I was recently challenged by trying to collect retail device data and needed a way to stop Hopper. I was running on a standalone device and an unexpected error dialog popped up and Hopper dismissed the dialog before I could take a look. The documentation...

OOM stands for Out Of Memory and is considered “business as usual” for Windows Mobile devices. Depending on the application and your platform, clicking on a close button will most likely not terminate your current application, just minimize it. Most apps...

In my previous post , we saw how to setup two CE devices and run a Bluetooth performance test. In this one, we'll see how to process and analyze the log file generated on the DUT device. I will use Excel to perform some calculations on the data and to...

There are a lot of people that afraid to switch of Vista because they are afraid that their stuff will not work. Well truth be told, I've been running Vista+VS2005_SP1+PB6 since March of this year and haven't had any major problems. The only two problems...

Recently the JDP team investigated a group of KITL timeout failures. Each timeout occurred under similar conditions and seemed to be associated with a single bug. At first we were puzzled as to why we were seeing these failures on different devices with...

Below is the second half of a well executed document from guestRx: Bulent Elmaci. Bulent has worked with Windows Mobile debugging for a long time and backs up his writing with a lot of experience. It is the first of a series of articles he has written...

The blog "Snow White's Poison Apple" describes how to test the most common suspend/resume hang. Other suspend/resume issues can be debugged over a "Passive KITL" connection. A standard KITL connection (a.k.a. "Active KITL") gets dropped when a device...