January 2005 - Posts

• Letting the debugger pick a debugging mode - Be cautious

  The "Auto" feature in the Visual Studio debugger guesses (based on the EXE used to launch the process) whether your app is managed or not. Based on this, it decides whether to turn on either managed or native debugging, as appropriate. If your C# (or Read More... Posted Thursday, January 20, 2005 8:37 PM by Matt Pietrek | 4 Comments

• Getting useful stack traces at exception time

  One problem with debugging exceptions from a JIT attached debugger is that the call stack usually shows the flow through the OS exception processing code, rather than the call stack exactly where the exception occurred. I've long known that I could pull Read More... Posted Wednesday, January 19, 2005 12:36 PM by Matt Pietrek | 2 Comments

• Where, oh where are my bug fixes?

  The Visual Studio and CLR teams are huge. If we were to all develop on the same code base simultaneously, we'd kill a lot of time because instability caused by one team's changes would affect the whole project. To remedy this, groups of developers develop Read More... Posted Wednesday, January 19, 2005 12:19 PM by Matt Pietrek | 11 Comments

• The "Matt's Huge Irritating Banner" Story

  By special request, another story from way, way back. In the early days of NuMega, our UI work was done by a guy (Bill) who worked remotely. When the UI launched the target process, it was responsible for initializing a data structure used by my runtime Read More... Posted Wednesday, January 19, 2005 11:54 AM by Matt Pietrek | 4 Comments

• File Handle Hell

  Raymond Chen has an interesting post about a program that tried to open a file, got back an error code, and used the error code as a file handle. In this particular scenario everything worked, but completely by accident. Reading it, I remembered back Read More... Posted Tuesday, January 18, 2005 11:55 AM by Matt Pietrek | 8 Comments

• My inner music geek thinks this is way cool

  Just saw this: http://www.umixitmusic.com/ Basically, it provides you with the isolated audio tracks of a song, along with mixing software. Don't like the guitar solo? Record your own! I haven't tried it yet, but I'm betting I will soon. The only technical Read More... Posted Friday, January 14, 2005 7:08 PM by Matt Pietrek | 2 Comments

• Debugging data driven development - Doable?

  In a discussion with some architects yesterday, I came upon the point that a new form of debugging is needed. So much development these days is data driven, and when something goes wrong you're back to trial-and-error poking at the problem. I'm sure this Read More... Posted Thursday, January 06, 2005 10:02 PM by Matt Pietrek | 5 Comments

• Interesting iPod lawsuit

  While most of the monopoly/anti-trust stuff that gets so easily thrown around is without merit, it's still interesting to see that somebody is suing Apple for only allowing iTunes to work with its iPod, thereby freezing out competitors. The uphill climb Read More... Posted Wednesday, January 05, 2005 9:50 PM by Matt Pietrek | 4 Comments

• Where have I been? (And other random mutterings)

  Yes, it's been awhile since my last blog entry. As you've probably read from other Whidbey grunts, the crunch time to the next milestone has pulled our heads out of the blogsphere. Mostly I've been using this time to work on bugs and performance issues Read More... Posted Monday, January 03, 2005 9:08 PM by Matt Pietrek | 4 Comments