Through the Interface

Advanced Visual Studio debugging: automatic expansion of watched variables

I've been using Visual C++ (and afterwards Visual Studio) since it was 16-bit, back in version 1.52. OK, maybe that's not so long ago, relatively (11 short years), but the point is that in spite of having followed the Visual Studio technology over this period, I've so far been completely unaware of the autoexp.dat file. This feature of the Visual Studio was brought to my attention by Ahsan Ali, a programmer in the Inventor Engineering team who was based over in Bangalore at the same time I was (we had both previously worked in the US - he had... Read more →

Debugging using Express Editions

Most of our desktop products support a "plug-in" model of development: you create a DLL (which may or may not be renamed with a number of extensions, such as DBX or ARX) which gets loaded into the calling executable's memory space. This allows the process to share memory with the loaded modules, improving performance over the more archaic IPC (inter-process communication)-based architectures. [Here begins retracted information...] While Visual C++ Express Edition supports debugging DLL projects using an external executable, Visual C# Express and Visual VB.NET Express Editions do not. When developing with our products it is extremely common to... Read more →