Author Archives: Ofek Shilon

Naming threads

Posted on April 10, 2009 by Ofek Shilon

There is a nice feature that is all but undocumented, and has next to no web presence too:  you can give your threads meaningful names. While this is trivial in managed code, it is hardly obvious for native.  The TIB … Continue reading →

Posted in Debugging, Visual Studio | 1 Comment

Debugging Native Memory Leaks, Part 1: LeakDiag

Posted on April 9, 2009 by Ofek Shilon

Leaking memory is probably the single most painful aspect of native code – its the reason managed was ever born. At work, our code routes ‘new’ calls through_aligned_malloc_dbg. This CRT API, along with cousins like _malloc_dbg and _calloc_dbg, takes extra … Continue reading →

Posted in Debugging | 12 Comments

Stepping Over Unwanted Functions

Posted on March 9, 2009 by Ofek Shilon

There’s an undocumented VS setting that lets you specify functions that would not be stepped into when you click F11.  This can be save quite a few clicks in situations of the form – Where pressing F11 would repeatedly step … Continue reading →

Posted in Debugging, VC++, Visual Studio | Leave a comment

Debugging a Process Launch

Posted on March 9, 2009 by Ofek Shilon

While this is hardly a hidden setting, I found myself spending too much time to find it twice already – the msdn page describing it appears low on search results, since it uses very different terminology.  So,  if only for … Continue reading →

Posted in Debugging, Visual Studio | Leave a comment

Extending Error Codes – to DirectX and Beyond.

Posted on March 5, 2009 by Ofek Shilon

$err,hr is quite useful as is, but it only knows how to interpret built-in error codes. Happily, there is an easy way to extend it, via a section in autoexp. All it takes is adding lines of the form – … Continue reading →

Posted in Debugging, Visual Studio | Leave a comment

Watching Errors in Visual Studio

Posted on March 5, 2009 by Ofek Shilon

System and COM routines often set an error code, that can be retrieved by GetLastError.   There are several ways to decipher this code – (1) Use the command line net helpmsg, (2) From the VS menu, select Tools/Error Lookup … Continue reading →

Posted in Debugging | 2 Comments

EnumDisplayMonitors Troubles – NvCpl solutions.

Posted on March 1, 2009 by Ofek Shilon

Recently I had EnumDisplayMonitors presenting some strange behaviour, exposing 2 monitors when in fact only one was connected. The nVidia Control panel API eventually came to the rescue – it exposes the entire functionality available via the nVidia control panel, … Continue reading →

Posted in Win32 | Leave a comment

Movies Trouble in PowerPoint

Posted on February 28, 2009 by Ofek Shilon

(Note: most of this post avoids developer jargon, in hope of being useful to all users) Did you ever give a media-rich presentation, and had to sheepishly apologize to the audience when some movies just wouldn’t play?    Did you ever … Continue reading →

Posted in MS Office | Tagged , | 16 Comments

2D Matrix Watch – Introducing autoexp.dat

Posted on February 26, 2009 by Ofek Shilon

Deep inside your VS installation (%VS installation%\Common7\Packages\Debugger), hides a bag of goodies called autoexp.dat. It is only semi-official, and almost entirely undocumented. Andy Pennell confesses its his fault,  but I suspect there’s more to it.  Admittedly, its still (as of … Continue reading →

Posted in Debugging, Visual Studio | 4 Comments

Resolving linker warning LNK4221

Posted on February 24, 2009 by Ofek Shilon

While cleaning up code warnings I came across LNK4221: “xxx.obj: no public symbols found; archive member will be inaccessible.”. The message does point out the culprit obj file, but not much more. both the documentation and a knowledge base article … Continue reading →

Posted in VC++ | Tagged | 2 Comments