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November 2006 - Posts

Wednesday, November 29, 2006 6:52 PM

Table of Cool .NET Tools

Here are some cool .NET tools from MSDN / codeplex, complete with Download and tutorial links. Tool Summary Where to get it Links CLR Profiler Easy way to measure memory performance for managed apps. Download for .NET 2.0 , .NET 1.1 Tutorial Perf Console
Posted by jmstall | 9 Comments
Wednesday, November 29, 2006 12:24 AM

Marshal opaque structs as IntPtr instead of Byte[]

If you have an opaque native structure that you want to pass through managed code, consider using IntPtr, not Byte[], in your marshalling signatures. Opaque means that you don't care about the contents of the buffer. For example, if in C#, you pinvoke
Posted by jmstall | 5 Comments
Tuesday, November 28, 2006 6:51 PM

Creative usage

I picked up a sketchpad and a 64-pack of colored pencils at a local hobby store to do so random drawing. I'm no artist and I can't draw. (My artistic abilities are show-cased on the yellow arrow here ). However, I do get a kick out of doing various math
Posted by jmstall | 0 Comments
Sunday, November 26, 2006 9:16 PM

AppDomain.ProcessExit is not guaranteed to be called

The AppDomain.ProcessExit is not guaranteed to be called. It's pretty resilient and will deal with common things you may cause from low-trust IL (exceptions, out-of-memory, etc), but there are some things (like rude process shutdown), that an inprocess
Posted by jmstall | 7 Comments
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Wednesday, November 22, 2006 10:02 PM

Mdbg (C# debugger in C#) source sample updated

We've just updated the MDbg sample! This is a full source sample for building a managed debugger in C#. It's available here . (This is the same link as before. If it brings up version 1.0, just try refreshing the page until you get mdbgSample 21 .EXE).
Posted by jmstall | 5 Comments
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Wednesday, November 22, 2006 9:11 AM

Thoughts on Vista from a non-computer person

Previously, I installed Vista on my home computer . Here are some comments from my wife. I found her feedback interesting because her usage patterns are closer to the average than mine are. She's not a developer (would never use Visual Studio or write
Posted by jmstall | 2 Comments
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Wednesday, November 22, 2006 12:14 AM

Viewing types with Reflection-Only

It's natural for a tool to use Reflection-Only loading to load an assembly and view the types in it. For example, I used this in my pdb2xml tool. However, I missed an important detail that I wanted to warn you about after getting it wrong myself. Consider
Posted by jmstall | 5 Comments
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Friday, November 17, 2006 11:27 PM

Hit 300 mark

I hit the 300 post mark. (I hit the 200 mark back in Feb ). Some days I feel like I'm still going strong and other days I feel like I'm running out of ideas. It's still fascinating to see which posts get a lot of interest and which don't. It's usually
Posted by jmstall | 0 Comments
Tuesday, November 14, 2006 3:55 PM

LCG + Debuggability, and your feedback

I mentioned earlier that you can debug Reflection.Emit code . Unfortunately, Ref.Emit code can't be unloaded unless you unload the entire appdomain. I wanted to lay out the current landscape, and then get feedback about possible solutions. In Whidbey,
Posted by jmstall | 13 Comments
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Monday, November 13, 2006 10:19 PM

Rename Mdbg forum to "Building Development and Diagnostic Tools for .Net"

We've renamed the ICorDebug / Mdbg forum to " Building Development and Diagnostic Tools for .Net ", which effectively is expanding the scope. Jon Langdon posted the announcement here . This still includes ICorDebug and Mdbg questions, but also explicitly
Posted by jmstall | 1 Comments
Monday, November 13, 2006 12:17 AM

My experiences Installing Vista at Home

I've upgraded my home computer from Windows XP sp2 to Vista , which you must have heard that Microsoft recently shipped. Things went great and I'm getting excited to be using Vista. I wanted to blog about my thoughts on the upgrade experience; and later
Posted by jmstall | 6 Comments
Tuesday, November 07, 2006 12:27 PM

Binary Patching tools (mspatcha, mspatchc)

Microsoft has some great binary patching tools. In my simple tests they're over twice as size efficient as zip files, and in some cases 10x more efficient. It took me about 2 hours of searching around to find them, so I wanted to pass it on. I started
Posted by jmstall | 7 Comments
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Friday, November 03, 2006 12:38 PM

The Tester's dilemma: proving you can count to a million

How would you prove to a skeptic that you can count to a million (and pronounce each of the numbers)? Proving you can count to 10 is easy since you can just rattle it off in a few seconds. This is the same sort of daily dilemma a tester faces: how do
Posted by jmstall | 4 Comments
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