This will be the only update this week because I am on holiday - actually, I am taking a break from debugging stuff to work on writing fiction. I was going to write something from home but the video card on my home PC is very, very unwell so I have...

Tomorrow, Microsoft will be 30 years old. Just for a change, I will post a blog that isn’t about debugging. Instead, I would like to look back to 30 years ago and compare what we have now with what we had then. I hadn’t used a computer back then. I wrote...

I spend a lot of time looking at systems that are not working very well. Sometimes they are unstable. Sometimes they are not scaling well. Very often, these applications will be throwing many handled exceptions and sometimes a few unhandled ones. I don...

There are three common types of remote debugging that I plan to ramble on about. The first is when you do a kernel debug using CDB or WinDbg of another system via a serial or parallel link. Essentially, you are making you nice shiny PC in to a dumb...

Sorry that it has been a while since my last Blog. I moved desks and got pulled in to a new project that meant some very late nights indeed. Now, what did I lie about? I lied about heap fragmentation. It was more of a lie by omission. With ordinary...

Heap fragmentation is not a good thing and it happens constantly in most applications. The heap manager keeps fixing it up and the application keeps messing it up again. It is easy to concentrate on the implementation of your algorithm. Well, that...

Well, in programming terms, anyway. The garbage collector ensures that all memory and resources are returned when they are no longer needed and everything is wonderful. Well, almost. It does make it a lot easier not to get into a bad situation but...