Min Kwan Park's bLog : Tricks and Tips...

Catch your elusive bugs..

mkpark — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 05:03:00 GMT

Few weeks ago, I did presentationt to my QA team about how they can found elusive bugs faster and easier. I think that this information can be useful information to any one who tests a Windows application.

Please feel free to share your opinion on this PPT.

Looking for VS Beta1 debugger issues?

mkpark — Thu, 29 Jul 2004 03:40:00 GMT

Probably, many of my co-workers are adding these kind of information into their blogs. but I decided to make my own list again. so if you want to see, check “Known debugger issues in VS8 Beta1” article.

While you do test your program...

mkpark — Wed, 14 Jul 2004 11:29:00 GMT

In most times, while I do dogfood/test VisualStudio 2005, I put them under debugger to monitor several things...

- First Chance AV

- Unhandled Exception

- Userbreaks from System to process under debugger

- Appverifier(a tool which is part of Application Compatibility Toolset) notification via Int3(User break)

*ACT is downloadable from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=7fc46855-b8a4-46cd-a236-3159970fde94&DisplayLang=en

If you are using debug build for testing, you don't have to run your app under debugger in most of cases because your debug build may have enough asserts to show errors in early stage.

However for many QAs, using retail build which will be shipped to customer is more general. so monitoring app with Debugger and appverifier is very interesting ways to do.

For example, I saw fair amount of issues that the thread by RPC call crashes and the AV caught by RPC handler. so caller may handle it without actual crash but it ends up as random and catastropic errors. however under debugger, you can see this kind of issues. so you can easily figure out the real cause of random issues.

Adding to this, with various Appverifier options, you can expose memory and handle issues much easier by reducing the tolerance of memory/handle mis-usages. it is really useful to improve overal stability of your product.

Are you looking for the latest edition of "The VS7 Debugger doesn’t work. What can I do?" document?

mkpark — Wed, 10 Mar 2004 02:04:00 GMT

Well, while we are moved to this weblog, the link of my document is just gone from gotdotnet. and I got many mails from people about whether the latest document is.

so I moved it on my weblog. it is live!!! whenever there is any new issues from customer, I updated it. so please enjoy it. if you want to get word format doc with pictures, please send me mail. I'll forward it to you.

the link is http://weblogs.asp.net/mkpark/articles/86872.aspx

Remove OLE Exception filer

mkpark — Fri, 27 Feb 2004 05:37:00 GMT

Sometimes, we are seeing random hangs or crashes with our testing product. well when we actually look into the post issue state, in many cases it is not easy to understand what causes the problem.

One of the reasons not to see the cause is because the errornous situations are already dealt automatically. and OLE Exception filter is the very one in many cases.

To disable this, you need to do

Set the registry key to turn of Exception filter like [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Ole] IgnoreServerExceptions"="Y“
reboot your machine.

it will give you better chance to find out the very cause of nasty issues.

One thing to remember, after you set this registry key, you may see abnormal crashes with other applications which you couldn't see before. well this registry key is for entire system. so maybe some of application expose their internal issues to you. :)

ILDasm is your good friend...

mkpark — Fri, 30 Jan 2004 11:28:00 GMT

Some times, you get frustrated because your code doesn't work when it calls methods from other people such as framework. also you don't have source code of the methods. so, even with the reference, it is not easy to understand what is wrong. Well then, open the assembly and look into the IL code with ILDasm.

If you have little knowledge of x86 assembly code, you probably can recognize the similarity in IL code. so, you will be able to understand what could be cause of your problem.