December 2005
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A change of technologies
I started back with an investment banking client this week. I’m working with the team that brought us “the refactoring project” and another small team, and integrating the trade entry system with some “xll” … -
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3 days with JMock
As I mentioned last week, I’m currently doing some Java work with an investment banking client. This week I added JMock to their toolset. JMock is a dynamic mock object generation tool that works with JUnit to allow you to create mock … -
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I guess I'll file that in the 'I didn't know you could do that' pile
Ned Batchelder reminds us of the value of the C++ FAQ (Lite). It’s been a long while since I’ve looked at it yet Ned’s example shows that I’ve still a lot to learn about the subtleties of C++. I can think of a few … -
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DbgHelp weirdness
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 in the target process. … -
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I think the weirdness was me
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 startup … -
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Naming Win32 threads - how it works
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 to … -
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Panto season!
In case you missed it the first time around… We’re doing the old “assert is evil”/“Oh no it isn’t” thing over at Ned Batchelder’s place. -
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STLPort 5.0 and multiple VC versions
I’m in the process of testing some of my code with Visual Stuio 2005 and the first thing I found that I needed to do was to upgrade my STLPort installation from 4.6.2 to 5.0.0 to get a version that built with VC8. Given that I like to … -
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Pluggable exception handling
Ben takes the “throw as an exception dispatcher” idiom to its logical conclusion by presenting a pluggable exception handler. As Ben says “I’m not sure how many situations something like this would be useful in, but … -
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On Edit and Continue
Dennis Forbes talks about “Edit and Continue” in VS 2005 and asks “Is it, coupled with similar tool advances, making programmers sloppier, though?” I think so… In the Visual C++ debugger we’ve had … -
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More thoughts on thread naming
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 ID. Having … -
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Interesting article on deadlock detection in DDJ this month
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 … -
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Is it just me, or do the best toys always come with an SDK
I got a Garmin eTrex Vista C handheld GPS as a Christmas present. Another cool tool to add to my geeky ski stuff. So far I’ve only used it to navigate to and from a restaurant yesterday lunch time, but it seems to have lots of … -
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Thought for the day
Does anyone in IT use paper clips for anything other than resetting hardware either by pressing those hard to reach reset buttons or by shorting out bios batteries, etc? -
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Garmin eTrex Vista C communications protocols
As I mentioned a while back, I got a Garmin eTrex Vista C handheld GPS as a Christmas present and there’s code available from the Garmin website that lets you talk to it via its USB interface. There’s also a specification …