Author Archives: Ofek Shilon

Visual Studio Projects that Just Keep Rebuilding, or: How Quantum Mechanics Mess Up Your Build

Posted on August 16, 2015 by Ofek Shilon

A lot has already been said on it, (no, seriously, a lot) and yet some root causes are not yet covered. All that follows holds for C++ projects, C#, VB, and everything MSBuild in general. The symptom Normally if you build your solution, change … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 7 Comments

How to Make a Phone Book Build and Run

Posted on April 19, 2015 by Ofek Shilon

Here’s a short cheat sheet summarizing an internal talk I gave a while ago about VC++ build diagnostics. These switches and tools are all documented, most are surveyed in previous posts here, and all are very useful when struck by … Continue reading →

Posted in Visual Studio | Leave a comment

An equivalent project (a project with the same global properties and tools version) is already present

Posted on April 13, 2015 by Ofek Shilon

Quick note: when you get this error while trying to add a VC project to your solution, good chance your project is missing a .filters file. Googling taught me only that the same error message had a different reason a … Continue reading →

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

Tinkering with VS2015 (CTP 6)

Posted on March 27, 2015 by Ofek Shilon

Today I downloaded the latest VS bits and played around with the native debugger. It was a brief session and so would be the records of my impressions. J Universal CRT is here! And seems like a great idea. A … Continue reading →

Posted in Debugging, VC++ | Leave a comment

Accelerating Debug Runs, Part 2: _ITERATOR_DEBUG_LEVEL

Posted on October 14, 2014 by Ofek Shilon

A previous post discussed the Windows Debug Heap – with the main motivation being how to avoid it, as it is just empty, expensive overhead, and it isn’t clear why it is on by default in the first place. Remarkably, … Continue reading →

Posted in Debugging, VC++ | 1 Comment

Accelerating Debug Runs, Part 1: _NO_DEBUG_HEAP

Posted on September 20, 2014 by Ofek Shilon

(A more appropriate but even-less-catchy title might have been ‘accelerating runs from the debugger‘. As elaborated below, these two are not strictly equal). A common notion is that debug builds can and should carry as much debugging overhead as one … Continue reading →

Posted in Debugging, Visual Studio, Win32 | Leave a comment

Debugging Memory Corruption II

Posted on August 1, 2014 by Ofek Shilon

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. … Continue reading →

Posted in Debugging, VC++ | 3 Comments

Hidden Tracepoint Keywords

Posted on July 30, 2014 by Ofek Shilon

The tracepoints window includes instructions for several special keywords, the most useful by far being $CALLSTACK:   These are not all there are – two more exist: $TICK and $FILEPOS. Quoting the documentation: $TICK inserts the current CPU tick count, while $FILEPOS inserts … Continue reading →

Posted in Visual Studio | Leave a comment

Debugging Handle Leaks

Posted on July 8, 2014 by Ofek Shilon

This is all well documented stuff and I won’t go into details – it’s here mostly for self reference (3rd time I had to chase this down in google). Steps are: (1) Install WDK to integrate the WinDbg engine with … Continue reading →

Posted in Debugging, Visual Studio, Win32 | Leave a comment

UseDebugLibraries and Wrong Defaults for VC++ Project Properties

Posted on June 23, 2014 by Ofek Shilon

Many of the projects I’m working on seem to have wrong default properties in Debug configuration.  For example, ‘Runtime Library’ is explicitly set to /MDd but defaults to /MD. ‘Basic Runtime Checks’ is explicitly set to /RTC1 but defaults to  … Continue reading →

Posted in MSBuild, VC++ | 5 Comments