How can you tell if your code is being called from within DllMain? You could use an undocumented function from ntdll.dll.
Interop assemblies containing certain constructs will cause a BadImageFormatException in .NET 4.0
COM objects that don’t have the expected lifetime can cause chaos when combined with .NETs garbage collection system.
How do you find the unmanaged COM object that’s being referenced by a .NET object?
I’ve been seeing problems recently with fragmented virtual address space. During the lifetime of a process, bits and pieces of memory are allocated throughout the 2GB 32-bit address space to such an extent that large contiguous blocks of free space are no longer available. If anything subsequently requires a large block of memory (like, for [...]
VMMap is a new tool from Mark Russinovich et al that’s very useful for diagnosing virtual memory/address space exhaustion issues. I describe it here, and give some information that should help you interpret what it reports.
It seems that the extremely useful !locks command is broken in 6.11.1.40x, the current and previous release of WinDbg from the debugging tools for Windows.
You’ll get errors like:
0:007> !locks
NTSDEXTS: Unable to resolve ntdll!RTL_CRITICAL_SECTION_DEBUG type
NTSDEXTS: Please check your symbols
The suggested solution seems to be to roll-back to version 6.10.3.233, available from here, or you can just [...]
One of the developers who uses the .NET/COM interop DLL that I wrote recently informed me that when they used it in a certain way, they would get a fatal System.InvalidProgramException. Nasty. So I set about seeing how I could find out exactly why this was happening: here are the gory details…
To spoil the ending [...]
What do I mean by “featherweight debugger”? I mean implementing just enough of the debugging framework to get what we need from the debuggee and nothing more.
The problem I was trying to solve was how to get more information from first chance exceptions. We have a great deal of library code that uses catch(…) blocks [...]
