wintellect-blogs|Aug 1, 2007

Neat New Multithreaded Debugging Features in VS 2008

Sometimes the little features can make a world of difference. The VS 2008 debugger adds some help to those of us dealing with many threads running in our applications. The first is Show Threads in Source, which you can turn on either by selecting it from the context menu in the Threads window or the…
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wintellect-blogs|Jun 14, 2007

Wait Chain Traversal, PInvoke Trouble and Mixed Debugging on x64

My latest Bugslayer column is now online for your reading enjoyment. While it looks all cool and casual on the MSDN Magazine web site, I spent what seemed like forever on that column. It seemed simple enough to discuss the cool Wait Chain Traversal functionality in Vista to help find deadlocks, but I ran into…
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Blogs|May 16, 2007

WinDBG Starts to Show a Little CLR Love (Finally!)

Reading Volker von Einem’s excellent blog, he mentioned that WinDBG 6.7.5.0, the latest release, now shows the mixed managed and native stack in the Calls window. I hadn’t noticed that, but it works like a charm. In the screen shot below, I double clicked on the NSort!NSort2.BubbleSorker.Sort method and was taken directly to the syntax…
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Blogs|May 7, 2007

A New WinDBG!

Wow! I go on vacation[1] for two weeks and the world changes. Such is life in the software development world working on internet time. Microsoft releases its Flash killer, which is nice, but more importantly, a new version of WinDBG rolls to the world. For those of you that have been stuck with the WinDBG…
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wintellect-blogs|Apr 23, 2007

Excellent Devscovery Denver

We’re all back home after having a blast at Devscovery in Denver. Thanks to everyone that attended, as always you made us work our behinds off with all the great questions and challenges. I always enjoy conferences for purely selfish reasons: I learn a ton! Everyone is working on all sorts of interesting applications and…
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wintellect-blogs|Mar 31, 2007

Do You Want To Become A True Alpha Geek?

A friend of mine, Roberto Farah, has started blogging! I’m thrilled because he’s super hard-core and his blog focuses on really cool tricks and scripts with the Debugging Tools for Windows (AKA WinDBG). If you want to see how a master builds reusable scripts to peak and poke at mini dumps, definitely subscribe to Roberto’s…
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Blogs|Mar 27, 2007

Elevate a Process at the Command Line in Vista

Vista is quite nice in keeping you from running too many things at elevated rights so you don’t get into trouble. Where things breakdown are when you want to start a particular process with elevated rights from a command line. The RUNAS program does not have any switch to run a program with your user…
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Blogs|Mar 24, 2007

A Squeaky Clean ThinkPad X60 Tablet with No Craplets

Why is it that computer manufacturers totally insist on slapping thousand of memory sucking craplets on their computers? I bought a Lenovo ThinkPad X60 Tablet, and was agog at the amount of stuff in the default install. There were nearly more entries in the Programs and Features list from the factory than I have on…
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Blogs|Mar 18, 2007

Debug Crashes Immediately in Vista

As much as anyone, I really appreciate the effort that Microsoft put help end users to find resolutions to their crashes. However, after debugging a crashing application today, I got a little tired of looking at the spinning bar and itching for the Debug button of old. Fortunately, it’s easy to toggle off the automatic…
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Blogs|Mar 13, 2007

Visual Studio 2005 Remote Debugging to Vista

When you run MSVSMON.EXE on Vista, do you get the dreaded message indicating that you need to set the firewall, but when you do, MSVSMON.EXE errors out with an Incorrect Function message? After much struggle, I finally found the trick to remote debugging working correctly. Many thanks to this post on the MSDN Forums from…
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wintellect-blogs|Feb 28, 2007

Vista Ultimate Hold ‘Em Game Secrets

So much more work would happen at Wintellect if I hadn’t installed Vista and downloaded the Hold ‘Em Poker game. Wow! Is it ever addicting! Anyway, as I’ve been playing with the game a bit too much, I thought I’d mention the two secrets I found to speed up your play. The first is that…
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wintellect-blogs|Feb 16, 2007

Phenomenal .NET Profiling Tool Upgraded

The fine people at SciTech have released their 30 version of .NET Memory Profiler, the tool if you want to look at your .NET memory. Isn’t it funny, the marketing people tell you that with .NET you no longer have to worry about memory, but what does everyone worry about? Memory! The 3.0 version adds…
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