Continue reading A short (and round) history of the button
Category Archives: Windows
.NET DLLs Loaded Twice
If, like me, you’re still squeezing yourself into 32-bit Windows processes, you’re probably, also like me, constantly keeping an eye on the virtual address space usage of your application. If you happen to have used something like vmmap to take a peek at your memory contents, maybe you’ve noticed something strange with some .NET assemblies: they’re loaded twice! What’s going on…?
Continue reading .NET DLLs Loaded Twice
C++: The oldest new kid on the block
Nobody could have failed to notice the recent resurgence of interest in the C++ programming language. In particular, the recent Build conference was the most we’ve seen Microsoft talking about C++ for several years. Why has a language that’s been languishing in the “prehistoric irrelevance” category for so long suddenly come back into vogue?
Continue reading C++: The oldest new kid on the block
Am I being called from DllMain?
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.
Continue reading Am I being called from DllMain?
.NET 4.0 Type Equivalence causes BadImageFormatException
I recently discovered a nasty backward compatibility problem with the new type equivalence feature in .NET 4.0. Luckily it’s relatively difficult to hit it if you’re in a pure-C# environment, but if you happen to generate any assemblies directly using IL, you should watch out. Read on for all the gory details.
Continue reading .NET 4.0 Type Equivalence causes BadImageFormatException
Modifying the VC runtime to get better heap allocation stack traces
Today I was trying to track down some – how can I put this politely – “unusual” memory usage in some unmanaged code running inside Excel. I broke out WinDbg and tried the usual suspects to get an idea of how memory was being used. Unfortunately, the way that msvcr80.dll is built stopped me from getting decent stack traces for the allocations, so I decided to try and rebuild it with a fix to remedy the situation.
Continue reading Modifying the VC runtime to get better heap allocation stack traces
Where’s my window?
On Windows, if you regularly change screen resolution or size, perhaps by accessing a machine remotely, you might find some of your application windows are no longer visible; they’re positioned outside of the visible display area. If you can’t see the window, it can be a little difficult to use the application. How can you get that window back?
Continue reading Where’s my window?
A WPF custom control in F#
In the world of WPF with its powerful templating support, you’re much less likely to need to build a custom control from scratch than you are with legacy Windows GUI frameworks. For the vast majority of scenarios it’s possible to take an existing control and modify its appearance and behaviour to get what you need. However it is still possible and sometimes necessary to build something in code. The other day I was looking at creating one – using F# of course – and realised that a skeleton control serves as a good example of the kind of cross-paradigm features the language offers. They’re the kind of things that make it possible to use functional F# with inherently imperative .NET languages and frameworks like WPF.
Continue reading A WPF custom control in F#
Don’t do anything in DllMain… Please
Novice Windows programmers can often think that DllMain is a good place to get that one-time set-up and tear-down work done. It seems to offer an ideal opportunity to know when your DLL has just been loaded, and when it’s about to be unloaded. What better place to add all that expensive, complicated initialisation…? STOP! WAIT! Before you add anything in DllMain, make sure you understand what state the process will be in when it gets called. Once you know that, you may well change your mind…
Continue reading Don’t do anything in DllMain… Please
FormatException in WPF DataBinding
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…
Continue reading FormatException in WPF DataBinding