Monthly Archives: April 2012

A Day with VS11 Beta – part 1

Posted on April 30, 2012 by Ofek Shilon

A large chunk of our customers still use XP so we won’t be upgrading VS any time soon. Still, out of curiosity I spent some free time with the VS11 Beta and below are some bits and pieces I noticed … Continue reading →

Posted in Visual Studio | 1 Comment

Windows Internals Course by Sela College

Posted on April 22, 2012 by Ofek Shilon

A word just for Israeli readers: Sela College has agreed to open a Windows Internals Class in Ramat-Gan. It’s a 5 day course, every Sunday starting June 24. It’s obviously based on the identically named book, and the syllabus is … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

QuickTip: Toggle disassembly with Ctrl+F11

Posted on April 22, 2012 by Ofek Shilon

Short post today. For a long while I’ve been switching to disassembly with Alt+8, as appears under the Debug/Windows menu: – and back with Ctrl+Alt+0, as appears under View menu: A while ago I discovered there’s a more pleasant shortcut, … Continue reading →

Posted in Tips, Visual Studio | Leave a comment

Viewing types, part 3: Exceptions

Posted on April 16, 2012 by Ofek Shilon

Last time a way was shown to use internal RTTI mechanics to view C++ type names without direct debugger aid. There is one place in particular where such type names carry substantial information, and that is c++ exceptions. These can … Continue reading →

Posted in Debugging, VC++ | 1 Comment

Viewing types, part 2: the manual way

Posted on April 11, 2012 by Ofek Shilon

Compiling with /d1reportAllClassLayout, even an empty file, dumps many compiler-intrinsic types. Six of these are interesting in the present context:  _PMD, _TypeDescriptor, _s__RTTIBaseClassDescriptor2, _s__RTTIBaseClassArray, _s__RTTIClassHierarchyDescriptor, and _s__RTTICompleteObjectLocator. Most of this machinery exists solely for multiple inheritance, and virtual inheritance in … Continue reading →

Posted in Debugging, VC++ | 3 Comments

Viewing types, part 1: The Normal way

Posted on April 9, 2012 by Ofek Shilon

Suppose C derives from B, which derives from A: Now create A-pointers which point to children types, B and C, and watch them in VS: The types in square brackets are the most derived types of the referenced objects. How … Continue reading →

Posted in Debugging, VC++ | Leave a comment