Some years ago I shared a trick that let’s you call _CrtCheckMemory from the debugger anywhere, without re-compilation.   The updated (as of VS2013) string to type at a watch window is:

{,,msvcr120d.dll}_CrtCheckMemory()

Let’s expand on that today, in two steps.

Checking memory on every allocation

The CRT heap accepts a neat little flag, called: _CRTDBG_CHECK_ALWAYS_DF.  Here’s how it used:

int main()
{
// Get current flag
int tmpFlag = _CrtSetDbgFlag(_CRTDBG_REPORT_FLAG);

// Turn on corruption-checking bit
tmpFlag |= _CRTDBG_CHECK_ALWAYS_DF;

// Set flag to the new value
_CrtSetDbgFlag(tmpFlag);

int* p = new int[100]; // allocate,
p[101] = 1;   // corrupt,    and…

int* q = new int[100];  // BOOM! alarm fires here

}

Testing for corruption on every allocation can tangibly slow down your program, which is why the CRT allows testing only every N allocations, N being 16, 128 or 1024.  Usage adds half a line of code – pasted from MSDN:

// Get the current bits
tmp = _CrtSetDbgFlag(_CRTDBG_REPORT_FLAG);

// Clear the upper 16 bits and OR in the desired frequency
tmp = (tmp & 0x0000FFFF) | _CRTDBG_CHECK_EVERY_16_DF;

// Set the new bits
_CrtSetDbgFlag(tmp);
}

Note that testing for corruption on every memory allocation is nothing like testing on every memory write – the alarm would not fire at the exact time of the felony, but since your software allocates memory (even indirectly) very often – this will hopefully help narrow down the crime scene quickly.

Checking memory on every allocation – from the debugger

You might reasonably want to enable/disable these lavish tests at runtime.

The debug flags are stored in {,,msvcr120d}_crtDbgFlag, and the numeric value of _CRTDBG_CHECK_ALWAYS_DF is 4, so one might hope that these lines would enable and disable these intensive memory tests:

Alas, this doesn’t work – _CrtSetDbgFlag contains further logic that routes the input flags further to internal variables. The easiest solution is to just call it:

First two lines enable, last two lines disable.  If you’re running with non default flags, the actual values you’d see might be different.