Welcome to MSDN Blogs Sign in | Join | Help

Browse by Tags

All Tags » Debugging   (RSS)
Monday, July 28, 2008 2:34 PM

Make your code more maintainable: The evils of the Return statement

What does it mean to make code more maintainable? Certainly obfuscated code is hard to understand, by definition. A big part of maintainability is making it easier for others to read and understand what the code is doing. Your code may have been working
Posted by Calvin_Hsia | 6 Comments
Friday, April 11, 2008 12:54 PM

Examine .Net Memory Leaks

Writing programs using .Net is very productive. One reason is because much of memory management is “managed” for you. In C, C++ and other “native” languages, if you allocate memory, you’re responsible for freeing it. There were stopgap measures, like
Posted by Calvin_Hsia | 6 Comments
Wednesday, February 27, 2008 12:12 AM

Find the Executing function's name

Often I want to write the SAME code that will display the name of the currently executing method or function. That way I can just copy/paste the same code into multiple methods. For example, in sub Form1_Load I could put this line: System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine(
Posted by Calvin_Hsia | 4 Comments
Tuesday, October 02, 2007 11:49 PM

Customize the display of types in the Debugger using Extension Methods and DebuggerDisplay Attribute

I was writing some code using System.Text.StringBuilder . : Dim sb As New StringBuilder( "Init SB String" ) At a breakpoint the debugger Locals Window shows + sb {System.Text.StringBuilder} System.Text.StringBuilder If I expand by clicking on the "+",
Posted by Calvin_Hsia | 5 Comments
Filed under: , ,
Monday, August 06, 2007 12:45 PM

Find which DLLs in your system are rebased

You can use CreateToolhelp32Snapshot and its family of functions to enumerate the running processes on your machine, including the modules loaded by each process My prior post ( DLL Image base addresses are the same in XP, different on Vista ) described
Posted by Calvin_Hsia | 6 Comments
Monday, February 26, 2007 10:43 AM

How to log application API calls using import module addresses

Let’s log all the calls that Excel makes to open or create a file. Start Visual Studio (any version), choose File->Open->Projects. In the dialog, change the “Files of Type” to “Executable Files (*.exe)” Choose any application like Excel: C:\Program
Posted by Calvin_Hsia | 6 Comments
Thursday, December 07, 2006 4:58 PM

Customer question: what does the crash call stack mean

A customer asks: I read your article "Intentionally crash your program". I have some questions that I hope you can answer. When a fatal exception happens, foxpro display the calling stacks. How to read the calling stacks? A calling stack seems to contain
Posted by Calvin_Hsia | 1 Comments
Friday, August 25, 2006 3:16 PM

Dynamically attaching a debugger

Sometimes something goes wrong with your program and you want to investigate why. You can start Visual Studio, choose Debug->Attach to Process and choose the process you want to debug. (The dialog also allows remote debugging and choosing Native, Managed,
Posted by Calvin_Hsia | 3 Comments
Filed under: , ,
Friday, August 11, 2006 9:34 AM

Problems reading and writing to the same file stream

I was helping a friend fix a problem that occurred in a VB.Net application. Upon inspection, an XML file was somehow invalid. The last few bytes were wrong. We found the code that modifies the file. It takes the original file, replaces a string with another
Posted by Calvin_Hsia | 0 Comments
Filed under: , ,
Monday, May 01, 2006 10:20 AM

Edit and Continue in VFP can save you time

Sometimes it takes many steps to reproduce a problem. Perhaps you have to start an application, log in, navigate some forms, menus, etc. until you finally reach a breakpoint in your code. Then you see the problem, want to modify the code and retest. That
Posted by Calvin_Hsia | 4 Comments
Filed under: ,
Monday, February 06, 2006 1:03 PM

Customize the VS debugger display of your data

As a software developer, I spend much of my time looking at code, learning how it works, and figuring out how to modify or fix it. A very good tool to help examine code is the Visual Studio debugger. (Even if you’re not a hard core programmer, the following
Posted by Calvin_Hsia | 12 Comments
Monday, January 30, 2006 6:14 PM

Find all statically linked libraries required before your process can start

There’s some code in this post What external code does your EXE depend on? that determines all the statically linked libraries and function calls of a particular EXE. VFP9.EXE links to about 18 modules. However, there are about 83 modules loaded when
Posted by Calvin_Hsia | 10 Comments
Wednesday, January 25, 2006 3:58 PM

What external code does your EXE depend on?

In the old days, when you wrote a program, you had full control over the CPU. The Instruction Pointer would always point to code that you wrote, and never anywhere else. That means if you wanted to do any kind of input/output, you had to write it yourself.
Posted by Calvin_Hsia | 8 Comments
Tuesday, December 13, 2005 11:50 AM

Inspect your memory image and see fragmentation

The VirtualQueryEx function can help to inspect the memory of a particular process. It returns information about the various memory pages allocated to a process. If a block is marked as MEM_IMAGE, it’s a loaded module, like an EXE or DLL, so you can use
Posted by Calvin_Hsia | 4 Comments
Wednesday, November 09, 2005 10:00 PM

Windows Security and how it affects running generated code

Here I described how VFP generates executable code and runs it for early and late binding COM clients and implementing COM interfaces. However, there is an important issue with generating and running executable code in the same process. A computer has
Posted by Calvin_Hsia | 6 Comments
More Posts Next page »
 
Page view tracker