Category Archives: Visual Studio

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

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 →

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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 →

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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 →

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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

Watching members in release builds

Posted on February 21, 2009 by Ofek Shilon

A typical development scenario:  you fight a bug that raises its head only in production build. You step through your code and inspect member variables, only to be greeted by utter garbage. There’s an easy workaround, surprisingly. The calling convention … Continue reading →

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