Where’s my window gone? I’m sure I left it around here somewhere…
Tag Archives: win32
Beware of using stack-based COM objects from .NET
COM objects that don’t have the expected lifetime can cause chaos when combined with .NETs garbage collection system.
Don’t do anything in DllMain… Please
Thinking of adding some code to your DLLs DllMain function? STOP!
Posted in Debugging, Software Development, Uncategorized, Windows Also tagged c++, COM, Debugging, dll Leave a comment
The 7 signs your UI was created by a programmer
Programmers are notoriously bad at creating good user interfaces. How can you tell if your app was designed by a programmer? (Hint: it’s easy).
Posted in Excel, Rant, Software Development, Usability Also tagged Excel, GUI, Usability 42 Comments
Finding the largest free block of address space
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 [...]
Posted in Software Development, WinDbg, Windows Also tagged address space, c++, perfmon, private bytes, WinDbg 2 Comments
Diagnosing out of memory errors with VMMap
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.
Posted in Debugging, Software Development, WinDbg, Windows Also tagged memory, private bytes, VMMap, WinDbg 1 Comment
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 [...]
Posted in Software Development, Windows Also tagged heap, pdh, perfmon, private bytes Leave a comment
