Category Archives: Visual Studio

Debugging, Software Development, Visual Studio, WinDbg

Examining PDB files with DBH

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Wow, it’s been a ridiculously long time since I’ve blogged. I think it’s time I put something up just to break the curse, and this seemed like a good, and hopefully useful, place to start. Time to polish some of these dusty drafts into published gems.

Ever been in that situation where you (or someone else) finds that Visual Studio just won’t set a breakpoint in some source code that you’re sure should be being used? You’ll see the hollow breakpoint icon and something like ‘The breakpoint will not currently be hit. No symbols have been loaded for this document’.
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.NET, Debugging, Visual Studio, WinDbg, Windows

Am I being called from DllMain?

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Lock; literal images 'r' us
Lock; literal images 'r' us
While Googling for an obscure Windows function the other day, I came across this fantastically useful repository of undocumented WinAPI functions, put together by Geoff Chappell. I’m not sure how I hadn’t discovered it before.

One of the functions that immediately caught my eye was LdrLockLoaderLock. I’d previously spent quite a few frustrating hours trying to figure out how to determine whether some code was being executed from DllMain, i.e. while in the loader lock, so I could avoid doing anything dodgy – or indeed, anything at all.

The case I was looking at was some logging library code that was used, amongst other things, to record the fact that DLLs were being unloaded. Unfortunately when this was called from DllMain, it sometimes caused a deadlock, for all the reasons we already know about. The library code was called from lots of DLLs, so it wasn’t feasible to fix all of the call sites, instead I had to make the logging a no-op when it’s not safe.
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.NET, F#, Software Development, Visual Studio

Calling MSBuild tasks with F#

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The other day I was trying to understand some strange behaviour in msbuild with regard to how it resolves referenced assemblies. I thought I’d try directly invoking the tasks that are used during the build, specifically ResolveAssemblyReference, so that I could experiment with them in F# interactive. It turned out to be pretty straightforward.
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.NET, F#, Finance, Visual Studio, WPF

Generating and plotting random numbers

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For a while now I’ve been planning to write a blog post about pricing financial instruments using Monte Carlo techniques in F#. As part of this I needed to generate normally distributed random numbers, and while putting together the code to do it I realised it was interesting enough to warrant its own post.

I’m making use of a few F#/.NET idioms to make the process easier. For instance, sequences (.NET’s IEnumerable) are used as the source of uniformly distributed random numbers. Also, to verify that the resulting numbers are actually normally distributed, we can easily use existing WPF/silverlight controls to visualise the values direct from within Visual Studio, in a manner similar to this previous post – but without having to write the plotting code ourselves.
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F#, Software Development, Visual Studio

Comparing lambdas in C++ and F#

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The other day someone pointed me to the new MSDN article on C++ lambdas in Visual Studio 2010. Interesting. C++0x has been a long time coming, but in my opinion anything that makes C++ usable at a higher level of abstraction is a good thing. There’s nothing wrong with a little abstraction, as long as you can get to the fundamentals if you need to. Otherwise you wouldn’t be using C++, would you?

But one of the things I couldn’t get over from that article is the verbosity. I’ve just got too used to the succintness of F#. I know this is only example code, so it’s intended to demonstrate usage, but the whole point of lambdas is to reduce boilerplate and make the intent of your code more obvious. So, let’s compare the C++0x implementation with the F# version.
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.NET, Uncategorized, Visual Studio, Windows

FormatException in WPF DataBinding

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While working on some F#/C# WPF code the other day, I kept hitting a fatal FormatException when running under the debugger. Annoyingly, the app would quit with:

An unhandled exception of type 'System.FormatException' occurred in mscorlib.dll
Additional information: Input string was not in a correct format.

But it worked fine when started from Expression Blend, or when run using Start Without Debugging in Visual Studio. Let’s take a closer look…
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F#, Visual Studio

Installing Windows SDK breaks F# Visual Studio integration

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Beware! If you install the Windows SDK – perhaps to get access to the interesting looking WPF performance tools – you’ll find that it hoses your F# Visual Studio integration. I found that it causes intellisense tooltips to stop appearing, and the integrated F# interactive to crash Visual Studio. Both of these issues are a real pain; especially the inability to see the inferred types “live”, which is pretty much essential for F# development – where the focus is on compile time correctness.

I remembered seeing a post on that Windows SDK blog that I’d come across relating to a similar issue with the XAML editor (I’ve been doing some work with WPF recently, more on that in a later post) so thought I’d try the steps they recommend, in short, re-registering TextMgrP.dll:

regsvr32 "%CommonProgramFiles%\Microsoft Shared\MSEnv\TextMgrP.dll"

…and all my problems went away. Hope you find this useful.

F#, Visual Studio

Visual Studio Toggle Brackets Macro

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After using a F# heavily for a while, I often found myself wanting to add brackets (or rather, parentheses) around some text. This is normally when adding a type specification to an argument in order to be able to use dot notation, e.g. going from:

let typeName t = t.Name

which causes “error FS0072: Lookup on object of indeterminate type based on information prior to this program point”, to the correct:

let typeName (t:Type) = t.Name

(These are obviously simplistic examples!)

So I broke out the Visual Studio macro editor for the first time in a while, and put together something to toggle brackets around the currently selected text. It’s naive, but, combined with Shift+Alt+Left Arrow to select the previous word, it’s effective:

Public Sub AddBrackets()

Dim s As Object = DTE.ActiveWindow.Selection()

If s.Text.StartsWith(“(“) And s.Text.EndsWith(“)”) Then

s.Text = s.Text.Substring(1, s.Text.Length – 2)

Else

s.Text = “(“ + s.Text + “)”

End If

End Sub

Copy this text into a module within your macro project, and assign a suitable keystroke using Tools|Customize|Keyboard.

Visual Studio

(My) Essential Visual Studio add-ins

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Thought you might like to know about a few Visual Studio tools and add-ins that I regularly use, and find very useful:

  • Copy as HTML

Fantastic little tool that lets you copy formatted text from the VS editor as HTML fragments. You can’t beat syntax highlighting to ease code readability, and this plug-in is great for adding code to blog entries, etc. Written by Colin Coller and available from http://www.jtleigh.com/CopySourceAsHtml.

  • VC++ Code Snippets

C++ has missed out on a few of the productivity boosters available for the managed languages in VS2005; one of the most annoying ones is code snippets – mainly because it’s omission seems so arbitrary, it’s not as if it needs reflection or some other CLR specific features. Anyway, it turns out that it is available, but as part of the “PowerToys” package, available from http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/bb190754.aspx. As well as being good for day-to-day productivity, code snippets are also a really powerful demo tool, allowing you to give the appearance that you’re writing code “live” when it’s really just glorified copy and pasting.

  • XPathMania

I do quite a lot of work with XML, and this little utility proves very useful. I used to use XMLSpy, but it was really too overblown when all I wanted to do was use it’s ability to quickly run an XPath query and see what it returns. This add-in allows me to do that directly in Visual Studio… lovely! It was put together by Don Demsak, and is available from http://donxml.com/allthingstechie/archive/2006/07/07/2792.aspx.