joc's bLog

I was at TechEd2009 a few weeks ago and I was so sad we weren’t able to talk more about VS2010 there as much as we wanted to. One of my highlights of the conference was standing in the lunch line while a group of folks from a variety of different companies...

Every so often my team likes to make me feel useful. I don't get to write code and fix bugs as much as I used to when I arrived at Microsoft, but I do have a good few tricks up my sleeve. Someone from the profiler team was looking at a stack overflow...

One of the more interesting things about working at Microsoft is the close collaboration the Microsoft Research (MSR) group has with academic research in many universities around the world. Today I was able to go to a talk form one of the researchers...

I'll be out at TechEd this year and delivering the next version of my Debugger Tips and Tricks talk, which I last gave at PDC. http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL59/ In the version of the talk for this year [DTL323], I'll have similar content on...

A fix for a widely reported crash in the Visual Studio 2008 IDE is now available. This fixes a crash that occurs after changing layouts (undocking/docking windows) and then changing modes (start stop debug, or switch to/from full screen. This bug was...

Even when I switch to "Release builds"? We recently got a connect bug on this so I thought I'd share my thoughts. In the debugger, we always try to minimize the impact we introduce on the debuggee, but there is always some work that we do in a synchronous...

This is an opinion piece, and my opinion at that, not of my employer. I was watching a debate on one of the internal support email lists for debugger related things last year when an interesting event occured. There is currently a limitation in the...

Last year's CTP of VSTS 2010 was one of the major milestones on the road to shipping what we think will be a great release. There's a lot of value, and much of it previewed in the CTP , but I've been feeling like we didn't get a huge amount of community...

For the last few weeks we have had reports of stepping issues caused by people installing VS 2008 SP1. You can see our acknowledgement of this issue here: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vsdebug/thread/f3fcb4fb-8a08-4fa0-8d58-9ed6f3eb1193...

The channel 9 rendering of my talk at PDC is now up for your general enjoyment/education/amusement. http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL59/ The topics I covered tricks in stepping, breakpoints, symbols, multi-threading and post-mortem. Judging from...

So I finally have some of my schedule figured out for the upcoming PDC. Most important for me is to actually turn up to my own talk :). Visual Studio Debugger Tips & Tricks Tue 10/28 | 12:45 PM-1:30 PM | 409A I'll be going over a few of my personal...

It's nice to at last be able to publicly discuss some of the features we've been working on recently. Brian Harry's blog entry here provides the best overall view of what our focus for this release is, and what features are delivered as part of that....

I was in a colleague's office the other day and ran into the now ubiquitous issue that people still buy or install the "Architect Edition" thinking it has everything. Although this was true in previous versions of VS, this changed with VSTS 2005 when...

It's been a while, but the time has come again for a Microsoft Professional Developer's Conference. I'm aiming to go to the show, I really enjoyed my time at PDC05. I look forward to meeting as many of you - the MS developer community - as I can. I'm...

As promised it is time to follow up with the PM jobs from our debugger expansion (Test to follow soon, promise!). There are three main areas we are hiring into the debugger for: Native C/C++ debugging PM As mentioned in my previous posting, this is...

We've been working for a while now on a plan to re-invest in one of Visual Studio's core strengths - the debugger. I'm very proud to be associated with one of the pieces of VS that is used by every developer almost every day, from the folks who actually...

I'll be at EclipseCon next week, but just the Wednesday and Thursday. If you read the blog and want to meet up or have some questions you'd like answered, leave me a note at the Microsoft booth that we are sharing with the folks from TeamPrise ( http...

I've seen many folks in our ISV community use the _NT_SYMBOL_PATH environment variable to set the path for symbols loading in VS. They often set this with symbol server included. Due to the current architecture, the environment variable is actually consumed...

Jackson on our team recently posted a sample on building a debug engine. In our architecture, the debug engine is the part that does all of the communication with the debugging/diagnostic APIs for a given platform, and communicates those back to the UI...

Happy New Year! Thought I'd start the new year with some more off-road fun on how to interact with the diagnostic components in VS. People have often asked me "what is the format for a VSP file John". The answer is "it depends". That sounds a bit glib...

A question that is common from folks in the field is "who's using the profiler at Microsoft". Recently we went on a tour of alot of the groups within Microsoft to understand how they are using profiling tools and to see what we could do in the VSTS profiler...

ScottGu just posted info on something our team has been working on in conjunction with Shawn Burke (NDP) and the Windows debugging team. When VS2008 releases, people will be able to debug into the .NEt framework libraries. We will be providing full source...

I thought I'd share a little bit of organizational info about the team I work in as a way to dust off this old blog. I'm trying to make sure I don't leave it as dusty as I have been prone to. About a year and a half ago, I worked with a few folks in...

I love Orcas. I would say that of course, but for me personally I've been involved in so much of the blood, sweat and tears (yes - tears) that went into our features (debugging, profiling, code coverage) that it's great to see it finally be broadly available...

For those of us that use ILDASM and Lutz's reflector tool often, "Friend of the VS Debugger" (I may try and make that something official) Andrei Faber has created a cool add-in that visualizes IL in the current context. Go here for details http://debug...