Stephen Toub writes about MDAs in MSDN Magazine (see here ). Whereas I focuses more on the platform implications , he focus on more practical stuff like: how to enable and disable them; specific MDAs of interest, specific demos to show firing...

Somebody in the comments asked for some practice interview questions for a development position. So here are some general practice interview questions for an entry-level development job in a C/C++ oriented group: 1. Basically any C-style string function...

Here are some random software things I use that really change how I work. OneNote : Word is not a good way to track general random information such as todo-lists, meeting notes, random thoughts, or anything that you would naturally write in a scratch...

I've been getting a lot of individual questions (usually via the contact form) about random things I know very little about. Unfortunately, I can't provide everybody the answers I'd like. Lack of time is one thing. But also, I often just don't know the...

Somebody asked me about .Dbg vs. .Pdb files. Basically, .Dbg files are the predecessor's to .pdb files. For managed code, you're always likely to see .pdb files. That's actually about all I know, but you can find out more here: http://support.microsoft...

In case you haven't already heard from every other blogger (like Shawn , JasonZ and Brad ) , V2.0 of the SSCLI (aka Rotor) is now available for download: http://msdn.microsoft.com/net/sscli . I just downloaded it myself. This is basically the source...

In ICorDebug, most operations are only available when the debuggee is stopped. (This was asked here ). Many things will fail with CORDBG_E_PROCESS_NOT_SYNCHRONIZED if you call them when the process is running. The motivation is: 1) Correctness : trying...

ICorDebug maintains a stop-count, and so if you call ICorDebugProcess::Stop() twice in a row, the 1st stop does the real asynchronous-break , and the 2nd stop is basically a nop that just increments a counter. You'll then need to call ICorDebugProcess...

The poor-man's version of Set-Next-Statement (aka, SetIp) is to just forcibly set the instruction pointer register (eip on x86) to the instruction you want to execute next. However, this naive approach has several problems that ICorDebug's SetIp solves...

Don't assume that if you have a thread doing a spin-wait, that you can attach / asynchronously-break ("async-break") and your debugger will immediately stop at the spin-wait. When you attach to a debuggee or async-break while debugging, the debuggee...

Correctness from the debugger's perspective is very different than correctness from the end-user's perspective. For example, the debugger exposes many invasive operations like SetIp. The debugger considers the operation successful if it sets the IP to...

I was bored in SeaTac Airport (my flight got delayed) and so I pulled out my laptop. I wasn't sure what I was going to do with it, but I didn't have any other entertainment options. My brain didn't have the mental energy to be productive, minesweeper...

I was reading Charles Petzold's rule " Don't even try to compete with the Docs " and it reminded me of one of the issues I struggle with as a blogger trying to decide what to write about... I find myself in a similar dilemma with blogging. Some people...

VisualStudio.Net 2003 has a config file saying that it's for V1.1 CLR. If you write your own V1.1 debugger, you should do that too. One big motivation is to ensure your V1.1 debugger creates the V1.1 implementation of ICorDebug. In V1.1, ICorDebug...

If you've looked at the MDbg sources, you'll notice it looks a lot like a V1.1 app. There are few to no V2 (Whidbey) concepts in there: few anonymous delegates, very little (if any?) generics, no 'yield' keyword. Since MDbg shipped in V2, why didn't we...

I've been reading through " Practical .NET2 and C#2 " (by Patrick Smacchia). I finished my previous book (" Why Programs Fail " by Andreas Zeller ) a little while ago. I'm impressed with the book. It's not a C# reference, although it describes new...

The desktop CLR JIT (at least x86) does dead-code elimination, even in debuggable code. This is obviously perfectly safe, transparent, (and good), from a program-execution perspective. But it can be a little surprising under the debugger because you can...

I find people often assume that just being a developer on the CLR means you somehow know everything about the CLR there is to know. I only wish! First, the CLR is a very large problem space and there's a lot to learn: 5 ECMA partitions. Multiple languages...

Here are two main ways a debugger can pass an environment variable to the debuggee. 1. Set the var in the debugger process , and then let the debuggee inherit them when its created. This is easy, but dangerous. For example, you should probably restore...

If you're at the Microsoft campus at the upcoming compiler-lab and want to chat about ICorDebug or low-level managed-debugging questions, ping us and we'd be glad to swing by the lab during a break and chat. People asked some great debugger questions...

Pinvoke.Net is a great site, and I was wondering whether to be happy or sad. On the bright side, it's great to see a community effort like that, and the site is really useful. On the down side, it's sad that pinvoke would be so complicated that something...

Vance Morrison , CLR Jit guru, and now Perf -Architect (succeeding Rico ) is blogging . Vance has an amazing wealth of knowledge. He's already written a great entry about how to figure out native codegen for things (such as foreach) and about SOS ; and...

Detaching a managed-debugger is somewhat complicated at the ICorDebug API level. In a perfectly-friendly API, you could just call "ICorDebugProcess::Detach" and be done with it. With managed-debugging, there are two main constraints and the hresults ...

Jan Stranik is on MSDN TV talking about MDbg , the managed-debugging sample written in C#. See the video here . Jan wrote most of MDbg, and handle a lot of hard problems about getting a working debugger in managed code. He gives a brief overview of...

V2 CLR added support for 64-bit (amd64 and ia64), and that includes managed-debugging support. So a 64-bit MDbg can debug a 64-bit managed app. But what about cross-platform stuff when your debugger and debuggee are different platforms? Here's how MDbg...