We all know that you can use C#'s foreach keyword to iterate through all items in an enumeration. Suppose you have a list of mixed-types: object [] list = new object [] {1,2, "abc" , 5f, "def" }; Trying to enumerate through the strings like this...

The STA/MTA threading problem is (hopefully) fixed in the latest MDbg winforms Gui . (which also has some cool new features, including an IL disassembly window ) The original solution implemented in the original GUI (described here ) had the problem...

Somebody asked on the forums about Edit-and-Continue (EnC) in mixed mode . You can't use managed EnC with mixed-mode ( interop ) debugging enabled. This is a limitation of the CLR Debugging Services. Both Interop-debugging and EnC are complicated features;...

Sometimes more is less. You may do more work to add a feature that turns out to get in the customers way. Here are some examples we've hit in the debugger-space: Example 1: Funceval : When you do a func-eval (via ICorDebugEval::Call*Function), the...

Imagine when you're designing a feature if there was an operation that was very useful 90% of the time; but the other 10% of the time it was provably and innately unsafe (either crashed, deadlocked, or gave back garbage). By "innately unsafe", I mean...

You probably heard that Iron Python Beta 1 was released . It has a small (but very worthy) breaking change, and I've updated the MDbg-IronPython extension accordingly. I updated it previously for 0.9.3 . The changes are related to redirecting the python...

ICorDebug has a nicely abstracted "Stepper" object, via ICorDebugStepper (I talked more about that here ). You setup a stepper object (via CreateStepper), resume the process, and then get an aysnchronous "StepComplete" debug event when the stepper is...

As a ship-gift for shipping VS2005 , I got my copy of VS2005 "Everything Edition" (Ok, it's not actually called that). I'm very excited about this. I've installed it on my home machine and am looking forward to using it for my various pet projects. It...

Let me make an analogy between debugging a program and solving a Sudoku. Sudoku is a number-crossword type of game where you fill in numbers in a 9x9 grid such that each row, column, and 3x3 box contain each of the numbers 1...9. The grid is pre-initialized...

Here's a webpage (courtesy of ASP+) that compares two XML files (eg, Xml Diff, Xml Patch). It also includes free downloadable version that you can run offline. As more and more things use XML, these sort of tools become more necessary. For example, I...

I've been reading up on ClickOnce and it is a very useful thing for easily deploying simple winforms app over the web (like an applet). This MSDN article followed by this FAQ are great overviews to understand it. It also helps having Shawn Farkas only...

I need to make an embarrassing public service announcement (PSA): Pinvokes are 100x slower under the debugger in VS2005 / Whidbey. For example, this is the issue that came up here . It may also manifest as your app "hanging" under the debugger w/ 100...

I've had several people ask me "if my managed app and pdb are both in memory, can the managed debugger get the source from the debuggee's memory too?". This is a very reasonable question, but the answer here is "no". It comes up in different scenarios...

Recently, I've been going through the standard fatherhood ritual of trying to setup of a webpage to share out photos of my kid. This naturally involves creating an RSS feed so that family can subscribe to the new image list. I wanted to be able to...

You may have noticed I got carried away making everything a RichTextBox in the latest MDbg GUI . That's because I just like having some color in the world, and RichTextBox makes it very easy to colorize text. Here's a simple function to write a string...

I've gotten several questions about debugabbility IL round-tripping. Round-tripping is where you decompile an app (perhaps via ILDasm), potentially edit the IL, and then recompile it (perhaps via ILAsm). This is the backbone for rewriting an assembly...

The ICorDebug API (the API for debugging managed apps) is about 70 total interfaces. Here is how I'd group the interfaces together, along with my random comments about how various interfaces fit into the big picture. A quick comment about interface...

Happy New year! My wife took our Christmas tree down, so I guess that's also my que to take my Christmas blog decorations down. Happy new year everybody.