Tag Archives: Debugging

Beware of using stack-based COM objects from .NET

By ian | Published: January 21, 2010

COM objects that don’t have the expected lifetime can cause chaos when combined with .NETs garbage collection system.

Posted in .NET, COM, Debugging, Software Development, WinDbg | Also tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Don’t do anything in DllMain… Please

By ian | Published: December 3, 2009

Thinking of adding some code to your DLLs DllMain function? STOP!

Posted in Debugging, Software Development, Uncategorized, Windows | Also tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Pinned DataTips in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2

By ian | Published: November 2, 2009

I’ve just noticed a nice little feature in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2: pinned DataTips. Values displayed in the debugger as you hover over a variable can now be pinned in place and remain aligned with the source. They can even have annotations added… Tasty!

Posted in Debugging, Usability, Visual Studio | Also tagged | Leave a comment

WinDbg !locks command broken

By ian | Published: June 3, 2009

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 [...]

Posted in Debugging, WinDbg | Also tagged | 1 Comment