Introduction to Debugging Silverlight Applications with WinDbg

I’ve had a few users ask me about finding memory leaks and understanding what happens with references in Silverlight. One very powerful tool to use when debugging Silverlight applications is the Windows Debugging Tools. You can download the 32-bit (x86) version side-by-side with the 64-bit (x64) version. Both WPF and Silverlight ship with an extension…

Easier Multithreaded Debugging

Last week I was working at Symantec and one of the people I was working with asked me the following: “When you’re debugging heavily multithreaded applicatons, Visual Studio doesn’t handle it too well. You can’t see multiple thread call stacks and locals windows at the same time. Worst of all, once you find that interesting…

How Does VS2010 Historical Debugging Work?

Visual Studio 2010’s Historical Debugging feature fascinates me. As you sit in the debugger, being able to move backwards while in the debugger (or attach the execution log to a bug) has to be the killer feature coming up in the entire Visual Studio 2010 release. Sure, there are some nice things with Silverlight, TFS,…

Visual Studio Remote Debugging and PDB Files

Thanks for all the comments and emails about my blog entry, PDB Files: What Every Developer Must Know. There was lots of nice feedback, but more importantly great questions! Instead of responding in the blog comments to these questions as I normally do, a couple of the questions were important enough that I wanted to…

Mastering Windows Debugging Virtual – Native Developers Rejoice!

After many, many requests, we are offering my Mastering Windows Debugging class as a virtual session on February 3 and 4, 2009. The world still runs on native C++ Windows applications so if are designing and debugging those hard core applications, this class is for you! We’ll cover all sorts of great native debugging tricks…

PDC Open Session: The Future of Diagnostics and Debugging/Tuning

There’s a ton two tons of interesting stuff coming up from the Diagnostics team in Dev10: the kind of stuff that completely changes the way you debug and tune! John Cunningham, the development manager for all diagnostic tools in Visual Studio, and I were talking and we thought it would be great to have a…

Just Where Did Those Performance Counters Go?

On a particular Vista machine, I was setting up a PerfMon view to monitor the .NET memory performance of an application and ran into a problem. The.NET Memory # Bytes in All Heaps Performance Counter wasn’t in the list of performance counters. That was quite odd so I checked if that Performance Counter was there…

Hear My Interview on Debugging

Craig Shoemaker recently interviewed me about my favorite topic, debugging, of course, for Pixel 8. We had a great time on the interview and I even got to tell one of my favorite debugging war stories. We also talked about all the parts of .NET that every developer should know. Head on over to Pixel…

An interview with me about The Performance of Everyday Things

At the April 2008 Devscovery (http://www.Devscovery.com) event in New York, I recently did a new talk entitled “The Performance of Everyday Things”. The talk is about the performance of using everyday constructs in .NET/C# such as method calls, arrays, loops, garbage collection, and much more. I will be repeating this popular talk at the Redmond,…

Debugging VBA Macros and Managed Components at the Same Time

This week I got the following question in email: I’m writing a COM component in C# that is used in Excel VBA macros. I really need to debug the VBA macro and the C# component at the same time. Is that possible? Absolutely! Here’s the steps: Start Visual Studio with no projects open. Select the…

Additional .NET Framework Source Code Debugging Tricks

With the big announcement today, everyone’s looking at the Framework sources like mad. Make sure you read everything in Shawn Burke’s blog entry before you start. I thought I’d mention a couple of additional hints to help you out. If you’ve been downloading your symbols with the Microsoft Symbol Server, make sure to delete your…

Updated Debugging Microsoft .NET 2.0 Applications Source Code (3.2.11114.1)

After four or five reports that the SettingsMaster Add-In was failing to create it’s toolbar on some systems, I finally gave up and quit relying on what the Visual Studio documentation says about the ext_ConnectMode.ext_cm_UISetup on OnConnection. On some systems it turns out that there is no way in the world that message is sent.…