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Setting a Watch on Wide Registers in VS
General-purpose registers can be watched from the watch window pretty much as regular variables: (the ‘$’ prefix is optional, but is recommended by MS – probably as means to minimize clashes with code...
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Debugging Handle Leaks
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...
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Debugging Memory Corruption II
Some years ago I shared a trick that let’s you call _CrtCheckMemory from the debugger anywhere, without re-compilation. The updated (as of VS2013) string to type at a watch window is:...
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Accelerating Debug Runs, Part 1: _NO_DEBUG_HEAP
(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...
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Accelerating Debug Runs, Part 2: _ITERATOR_DEBUG_LEVEL
A previous post discussed the Windows Debug Heap – with the main motivation being how to avoid it, as it is just empty, expensive overhead, and it isn’t clear why it is on by default in the first...
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Tinkering with VS2015 (CTP 6)
Today I downloaded the latest VS bits and played around with the native debugger. It was a brief session and so would be the records of my impressions. J Universal CRT is here! And seems like a great...
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Data Read Breakpoints – redux
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 linked to assumed...
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Checking Memory Corruption from the debugger in 2016
It used to be something like {,,msvcr80d.dll}_CrtCheckMemory() But this trick requires quite a bit of adaptation to use on modern VS versions. First, the relevant module is now ucrtbased.dll – thanks...
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Tracking the Current Directory from the debugger: RtlpCurDirRef
Some rogue code was changing our current directory from under our feet, and we needed to catch it in action. I was looking for a memory location to set a data breakpoint on. (Note: for the remainder of...
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Matlab’s mxArray Internals
Everything in Matlab is a Matrix. The scalar 4 is a 1×1 matrix with the single value 4. The string ‘asdf’ is a 4×1 (not a typo – it is in fact a column vector) matrix, with the 4 char values ‘a’, ‘s’,...
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