Category Archives: Visual Studio

Data Read Breakpoints – redux

Posted on March 12, 2016 by Ofek Shilon

The Problem ~5Y ago I blogged about data breakpoints. A hefty bit of the discussion was devoted to persistence of hardware breakpoints across a thread switch: all four implementations mentioned assume that HW breakpoints persist across thread boundaries, and some rough … Continue reading →

Posted in Debugging, Visual Studio | 1 Comment

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 →

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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

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

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 →

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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 →

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Discovering Which Projects Depend on a Project – II

Posted on August 18, 2013 by Ofek Shilon

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

Posted on August 11, 2013 by Ofek Shilon

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 #2: ‘Unspecified error’ Upon Solution Open

Posted on June 26, 2013 by Ofek Shilon

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.

Posted in Visual Studio | 1 Comment

VS Support Policy

Posted on September 1, 2012 by Ofek Shilon

As far back as this MS support page goes, Visual studio editions had a 5-year mainstream support period, and since VS .NET 2003 – a 10 year extended support period. In particular, VS2010 mainstream support is advertised to end on … Continue reading →

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