Category Archives: Windows

Troubleshooting an InvalidProgramException

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 [...]

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Programmatically checking memory usage

One of the things that’s useful in a pre-release check is do a regression test on the memory usage of your unmanaged functions. This should help to ensure that the fantastic new data structure you introduced doesn’t cost too much in additional storage for the order-of-magnitude performance improvement you were boasting about.
Like most of my posts, this assumes that [...]

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Creating a featherweight debugger

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 [...]

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The application failed to start because the application configuration is incorrect

Have you been seeing “The application failed to start because the application configuration is incorrect” errors? I’ve been doing some work on Windows Side-by-Side (SxS) stuff recently, and this is par for the course. One thing that not many people seem to know is that you should be able to get a lot more information [...]

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