Author Archives: Ofek Shilon

Another Look at the VS2012 Auto Vectorizer

A while ago I did some experimenting with (than beta) VS2012. After these experiments our team migrated to the 2012 IDE but kept to the 2010 toolset. Since then much had happened: an official VS2012 launch + 4 updates, rather … Continue reading

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Find Where Types are Passed by Value

Say you’re working on a large code base, and you came across several instances where some type of non-negligible size was passed as argument by value – where it was more efficient to pass by const reference. Fixing a few … Continue reading

Posted in VC++ | 2 Comments

Discovering Which Projects Depend on a Project – II

In a previous post I shared a hack that enables detection of all projects that depend on a given one, either directly or indirectly. @Matt asks by mail if I can suggest a quick way to isolate only the direct … Continue reading

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Discovering Which Projects Depend on One

I am working with several large-ish (100+ project) solutions – and at this scale, dependency management is a very real issue. While you can easily view (and set) the dependencies of a project by viewing its references, there is no … Continue reading

Posted in VC++, Visual Studio | 2 Comments

VS2012 Migration #3: autoexp and NoStepInto Replacements

In the past I blogged quite a few times about two immensely useful albeit mostly-unofficial debugger features: watch modification via autoexp.dat, and step-into modification via NoStepInto registry key. A long while ago I raised two suggestions at MS UserVoice, to … Continue reading

Posted in Debugging, VC++ | 3 Comments

VS2012 Migration #2: ‘Unspecified error’ Upon Solution Open

Solution: unbind and rebind all projects to source control. You can try and pin-point the offending projects, but why bother. The sln file does change (new SCC binding fields were added) but is still workable from VS2010.

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VS2012 Migration #1: “The Project ‘’ has been renamed’ and Other Errors on Build

About half a year ago I started experimenting with VS2012. It was not a smooth migration by any means, and I finally got around to recording online some of the lessons I learnt along the way. One of the first … Continue reading

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Entry Point Not Found, and other DLL Loading Problems

Occasionally I come across DLL load problems: The verbosity of the error messages varies greatly. In their raw form these include at least the DLL name, but as various frameworks come into play (for the error message above, it’s .net) … Continue reading

Posted in Debugging, Win32 | 19 Comments

Forcing Construction of Global Objects in Static Libraries

Suppose you have a global object whose constructor does useful stuff – say, registration somewhere or initialization of global resources. Suppose further this object isn’t directly accessed anywhere – you just need the functionality in its ctor. All is fine, … Continue reading

Posted in VC++ | 5 Comments

Quick Word to Fellow Hebrew Speaking Devs

It’s official – here’s some reference. (R2L in the editor is admittedly a bitch, though.)

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