Its been quite some time I updated this blog. Have been busy at work, and working on something which may not interest you if I had put it here (Just to summarize 2 years of work in a sentence, I worked on creating tools and framework used internally by...

Note: This is a simple ‘Week-end adventure’, to make a tedious task into automated, fast and reliable one. The output may not be completely bug free. Problem Description: I have ‘a lot’ of songs in my media library and I use SongBird player to listen...

Yes, today I finish 2 years working with my Dream company ! Its been great journey so far, and I guess company has given me everything that I ever dreamed for (except night job, but efforts are in motion to find some resolution to that! ) On development...

This is a very common question, we encounter almost all the times. Just imagine a situation, we have got a memory dump from somewhere and want to see what operating system which is run there and what SP is installed.. For this, there is a very simple...

Windbg has not only registers reading functionality but it can also modify registers when doing live debugging.. Its really useful sometimes to modify the register values and take different path to check for particular code branch.. You can modify the...

The team has just released a new subdomain that has neat and clean list of all SysInternal Tools, ready for you!! Take a look, http://live.sysinternals.com Stay tuned..

I've been using Visual Studio 2008 from few months.. Its really a great improvement over productivity.. I love new features and speedy IDE. Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2008 contains not only bug fixes but also lots of new features! Along with .NET...

I have found it necessary many times to keep an eye on last win32 error, while using Win32 APIs in code! (Calling GetLastError() after each API usage is not feasible solution!).. In Visual Studio they have provided a very good small feature. You can write...

Visual Studio 2005 onwards, watch window has got a pseudo register for investigating the details about process token. So, all you have to do is, just start debugging and write "$user" in watch window, Its interesting to look at expanded view...

I just worked with a customer who was facing interesting issue. He was getting 0x80080005 at client when he calls CoCreateInstance. The COM component is implemented within an ATL Service which is running on the same machine (we are not hitting wire/network...

How many times have you tried to run the debug build of your project on a test machine where you don't have Visual Studio installed, and faced issues? Issues like, For binaries built in debug configuration with Visual Studio 2005.. Activation context...

I have found many people who are beginning to learn COM Interop, looking for a sample application that explains how to use C# DLL from C++ application. Here is one sample that I developed (SLN file is in VS2008 format!) Stay tuned..

Do you want to use your .NET DLL (assembly) from VB6 or C++ application (native code) ? Yes, you can do that using COM Interop. As per COM rules, you need to get your assembly registered on system (in Registry, yes, thats how COM works!). To get an assembly...

I am very excited to tell that Microsoft announced Live Mesh Technology preview today. Its awesome piece of system, and will surely increase your productivity if you have multiple machines/devices at multiple location! I just love it!!! More details here...

As a part of Parallel computing initiative at Microsoft, we just released Parallel Extensions to .NET Framework 3.5 Community Technology Preview (CTP) which can be downloaded from here . Also, at MSDN, there is new section dedicated to ideas, technology...

Just now, I found a trick in Visual Studio 2005 to debug pointers in better way. You can ',n' in watch window where 'n' is number of elements to display. I think following snapshot is self explanatory.. Stay tuned..

I hear this problem occasionally. Customers have COM/DCOM component on the system registered properly, they want to enable DCOM on their component (to access the component over the network!). They need to modify the permissions for their component, for...

Here is a list of few interesting command-line parameters and their mapping to interactive commands in windbg.. PS: Taken from "Advanced Windows Debugging" (the best debugging book, I have ever come across!!).. Go grab your copy! Stay tuned..

I was looking for a way to install windbg as postmortem debugger so that everytime any process crashes or exits unexpectedly, windbg is launched automatically and I can take a look at whats happening there! Windbg has special command line option for installing...

Yet another debugging challenge. Imagine a situation where you get a memory dump from customer and need modules (DLL, EXE, OCX etc.) to further debug.. (.NET modules can be used to look at source code by reverse engineering..) SOS.dll is at the rescue...

Yet another debugging challenge.. The problem is, we want to debug the startup code for an application which is run by some other application! e.g. I will open a console (cmd.exe) which in turn opens calc.exe and I want to debug the initial calc.exe code...

This is actually an interesting story, Back in the days when we had 8 bit processors (8 bit processors means registers in processors will be able to hold 8 bit data), registers were called like, AL, BL So, when we moved to 16 bit processors, we named...

Sometimes when you debug applications, it happens that you have got the pointer to class which has few member variables including structures and another class objects! How to look at values of those inner class/structure variable's members?? So, here...

If you are debugging a lot, you might come across a need where you need to put a breakpoint on a function and special requirement is you need to break only when that function returns a specific value!! e.g. I am checking for CoCreateInstance method from...

If you want to look at commands supported by any windbg extensions, you can follow various ways. You can use !<ext_name>.help command to see all the commands supported by that extension. Replace <ext_name> with your extension module name....