http://www.lenholgate.com/ Len Holgate's thoughts on this and that... Mainly test driven software development in C++ on Windows platforms... - Debugging Tools en-us Len.Holgate@JetByte.com 2008-05-06T15:37:00+00:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000782.html Last week I mentioned that some of my tests for my Win32 Debug API class had suddenly started failing. It seems that I was right and the changes are due to some .Net fixes that have been rolled out recently.... Posted by Len at 03:37 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Debugging Tools , Testing ]]> 782@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Debugging Tools 2008-05-06T15:37:00+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000780.html Back in October 2007 I sumarised my findings from getting my Win32 DebugAPI based debug engine working on x64. One of the strange things that I found at the time was this: When running a CLR app under the Win32... Posted by Len at 04:43 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Debugging Tools , Geek Speak , Testing ]]> 780@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-05-01T16:43:42+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000727.html I've finished porting my debugging tools support libraries to x64 now and thought it was worth putting up a summary of the issues that I've noticed: A 32bit exe can't start a 64bit exe for debugging - pretty obvious really.... Posted by Len at 08:41 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Debugging Tools , x64 ]]> 727@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Debugging Tools 2007-10-04T08:41:35+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000725.html It seems that I've located the "issues" in my Debug Tools library. This library is used in my TickShifter (time control) tool and my native Win32 Deadlock Detection tool. Due to how I wanted to control the debugged processes start... Posted by Len at 09:48 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Debugging Tools , x64 ]]> 725@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Debugging Tools 2007-10-02T09:48:28+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000724.html I should be finishing some docs for the x64 socket server release... But this is more interesting... When running my Win32 debugging code on x64, this time when compiled natively as x64 code and when debugging an x64 CLR process,... Posted by Len at 01:50 PM | Comments (1) | Categories: Debugging Tools , x64 ]]> 724@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Debugging Tools 2007-10-01T13:50:33+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000723.html I spent a little time looking at an x64 port of my debugging tools library at the weekend. Since this requires me to set breakpoints and manipulate process memory and image files and all sorts I expected it to be... Posted by Len at 10:55 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Debugging Tools , x64 ]]> 723@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Debugging Tools 2007-10-01T10:55:03+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000680.html Back in April 2006 I posted a copy of TickShifter, see here for details. It seems that there was a bug in my Win32 debugger code on which TickShifter is built. The bug was that we failed to "forget about"... Posted by Len at 05:52 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Debugging Tools , Testing ]]> 680@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Testing 2007-03-05T05:52:34+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000657.html It seems that Vista contains lots of interesting new Win32 API calls and some of these provide built in support for deadlock detection... I guess my deadlock detection tool can operate differently on Vista then...... Posted by Len at 08:54 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Debugging Tools , Geek Speak ]]> 657@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2006-07-12T08:54:17+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000655.html It's funny how potential product ideas beget other potential product ideas and the thing that you eventually end up with as a product for sale is often far from the original product idea and the code that you started to... Posted by Len at 07:07 AM | Comments (7) | Categories: Debugging Tools , Debugging Tools , Testing ]]> 655@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Debugging Tools 2006-05-12T07:07:26+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000655.html It's funny how potential product ideas beget other potential product ideas and the thing that you eventually end up with as a product for sale is often far from the original product idea and the code that you started to... Posted by Len at 07:07 AM | Comments (7) | Categories: Debugging Tools , Debugging Tools , Testing ]]> 655@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Debugging Tools 2006-05-12T07:07:26+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000654.html A few weeks ago I wrote about hijacking threads. The principle was good, the code worked but the reason I needed it was flawed so the exercise was a failure. I assumed that it was likely to be a failure... Posted by Len at 08:26 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Debugging Tools ]]> 654@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Debugging Tools 2006-05-09T08:26:17+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000652.html My API hooking currently relies on creating a block of memory in the target process to hold the string that you need to pass to LoadLibraryW() and then calling CreateRemoteThread() and passing the address of LoadLibraryW() as the thread start... Posted by Len at 07:46 PM | Comments (2) | Categories: Debugging Tools ]]> 652@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Debugging Tools 2006-04-17T19:46:56+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000650.html Discovering and then fixing the problem that prevented my tools from running on themselves planted a seed of an idea in my mind. My APIHook library and any code that used it died horribly under leak testing tools such as... Posted by Len at 09:10 PM | Comments (1) | Categories: Debugging Tools ]]> 650@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Debugging Tools 2006-04-14T21:10:51+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000649.html One of the first things that I tried to do with the latest release of my TickShifter tool was to run it on itself. Of course, that didn't work. There are several reasons why the tool might have had problems... Posted by Len at 08:31 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Debugging Tools , Testing ]]> 649@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Testing 2006-04-12T08:31:47+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000648.html As I mentioned a while back, I've been working on adding rudimentary GUIs to my debugging and testing tools. In fact, both the deadlock detection tool and the time shifting tool are both functional enough for real world use but... Posted by Len at 09:49 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Debugging Tools , Testing ]]> 648@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Testing 2006-04-09T21:49:28+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000647.html Well, I figure that I've written about these debug tools that I've been working on for long enough. The time has come to make one available for other people to use and abuse. Given that I hope to sell some... Posted by Len at 04:47 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Debugging Tools , Testing ]]> 647@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Testing 2006-04-04T16:47:24+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000643.html When I came back from skiing in Colorado I had a bug report from a client and it took me a fair while to isolate the problem for them. The report suggested that a server that I'd built for them... Posted by Len at 12:02 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Debugging Tools ]]> 643@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Debugging Tools 2006-04-02T00:02:34+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000624.html The size of the "units" that I test with my unit tests varies quite considerably. Usually I tend to work at the single class level; the test will provide mocks for the services that the class requires and the tests... Posted by Len at 01:12 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Debugging Tools , Testing ]]> 624@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Testing 2006-01-16T13:12:47+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000623.html I've been plugging away at my multi-process Win32 debugger code this week and one of my test harnesses had started to suffer from intermittent "R6025 - pure virtual function call" errors. These tend to crop up if you call a... Posted by Len at 01:19 PM | Comments (2) | Categories: Debugging Tools , Geek Speak ]]> 623@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2006-01-14T13:19:13+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000616.html A while back Chris Baus wrote a little rant about prototypes. I started to write a piece that defended prototypes when correctly used and ran out of steam; or, more to the point, couldn't really say very much except they're... Posted by Len at 07:53 PM | Comments (4) | Categories: Debugging Tools , Geek Speak ]]> 616@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2006-01-10T19:53:03+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000598.html There's an interesting article by Tomer Abramson in this month's Dr Dobb's Journal about deadlock detection. He provides a compile in tool that works in a similar way to my deadlock detection tool and reports on potential deadlocks in... Posted by Len at 03:49 PM | Comments (4) | Categories: Debugging Tools , Geek Speak ]]> 598@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2005-12-24T15:49:06+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000597.html I've just finished the first cut of the code that handles the Win32 Thread Naming "API". This means that my debugging tools can now report the name of a thread (if it has been named) rather than just its thread... Posted by Len at 07:57 PM | Comments (5) | Categories: Debugging Tools , Geek Speak ]]> 597@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2005-12-22T19:57:05+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000592.html I've been using the SetThreadName() function from the MSDN docs for ages to provide a way of distinguishing between threads in the VC debugger. I always thought it was a bit of a weird 'API' but had never really thought... Posted by Len at 07:28 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Debugging Tools , Geek Speak ]]> 592@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2005-12-20T19:28:49+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000591.html A couple of days ago I mentioned that I was having some problems with loading symbols for a common controls dll. I'm now pretty sure that it was my problem, as usual, rather than someone elses. I've reworked my process... Posted by Len at 10:51 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Debugging Tools , Testing ]]> 591@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Testing 2005-12-17T10:51:23+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000590.html I was using one of my home made debugging tools recently and it kept crashing :( I assumed it was something I was doing but I've eventually tracked it down to where I load the symbols for the loaded modules... Posted by Len at 09:17 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Debugging Tools , Testing ]]> 590@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Testing 2005-12-14T21:17:28+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000577.html Every now and then I come across a situation where encapsulation has been taken slightly too far. Usually, or at least most recently, these over encapsulated designs have had problems because they've blocked access to an event handle. It's great... Posted by Len at 04:06 PM | Comments (1) | Categories: Debugging Tools , Geek Speak ]]> 577@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2005-11-15T16:06:42+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000576.html Recently I finished developing a high performance ISO-8583 financial transaction authorisation server for a client and whilst I was running the final black-box tests against the server I realised that these particular tests were dependant on the system date of... Posted by Len at 10:20 AM | Comments (4) | Categories: Debugging Tools , Testing ]]> 576@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Testing 2005-11-11T10:20:48+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000538.html It seems to be stack walking week; what with Ned's posting earlier about walking an unmanaged stack and now this excellent piece by David Broman on doing the same in with managed code.... Posted by Len at 11:24 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Debugging Tools , Geek Speak ]]> 538@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2005-10-09T23:24:01+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000532.html Jeff Darcy over at "Canned Platypus" writes about "How to add locking to a program". He laments the lack of a reasonably priced deadlock detection tool. I assume, from his backgrond, that he's interested in an Linux tool, so my... Posted by Len at 08:11 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Debugging Tools , Geek Speak ]]> 532@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2005-10-07T08:11:28+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000531.html Ned Batchelder has written about the code he uses to get a call stack out of a windows program (thanks for the link Barry). I've added a snippet of the code I use as a comment to his post. I... Posted by Len at 07:23 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Debugging Tools , Geek Speak ]]> 531@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2005-10-07T07:23:33+00:00