2006 July | EntBlog

Debugging Applications

July 15, 2006 @ 18:36 | In Books, Programming | No Comments |

Debugging Applications for Microsoft .NET and Microsfot Windows
Author: John Robbins
Pages: 801
Published: 2003

If you read MSDN, you probably read the column Bugslayer written by John Robbins. I’m a fan of Bugslayer so when I discovered this book I couldn’t resist to buy and read it.

This book is the Holy Bible for debugging. Seriously, I didn’t think someone could write more than 800 useful pages about debugging before reading Debugging Applications. 80% of the book is dedicated to Native Programming and the rest is for Managed Programming. Both using Microsoft Visual Studio 2003.

The book is divided in four parts. The first part is about general debugging topics not related with Windows: What Are Bugs?, Debugging Process, Bug Tracking Systems, Regression Tests, Defensive Programming (the chapter dedicated to assertions should be a must read for every member of a programming team).

The second part is about Win32 and .NET debugging support with two chapters entirely dedicated to native code: x86 assembly, symbols, dump files, windbg…

Third part is about Tools for debugging. It describes how to extend the Visual Studio IDE, introducion to Add-Ins and profiling API for .NET.

The fourth part is entirely dedicated to Native Code Techniques: Crash Handlers, Windows Services, Multithread Deadlocks, Automated Testing, C Run-Time Library and Working Set are the more relevants topics.

I really recommend this book. John Robbins is an expert and it is demonstrated in a very well written book. I really enjoyed reading this book.

By the way, the next revision of this book will be break into two books: one for the managed and one for native. The .NET version is already available for presale in Amazon

Rating: 9 / 10

Setting up a Symbol Server

July 6, 2006 @ 2:27 | In Programming | 5 Comments |

Debug symbols allow you to have better debugging sessions. They have information about the functions contained in executables and dynamic libraries and provide you with information to get clean call stacks. A Symbol Server allows the debugger to load the correct symbols, binaries and sources automatically.

In this article, I describe how to set up a Symbol Server for your programming team to store symbols (from the operating system, third party libraries and from your own libraries), binaries and source code to improve the productivity of the team and the service given to your clients.

Click to read the full article