A lot of time I just want to quickly look at how an object graph will be serialized to XML. I end up writing quick and dirty code like below time after time since I cannot find the code snippet I had written a while back. I am documenting it here so I do not […]
If the GetType method is called on a variable of NullableType then you will get the underlying type instead of the NullableType. This is because of boxing that occurs when the type object is converted to Object as documented at MSDN. So how do you get the declared type if you have a variable of […]
While debugging an issue I came across an interesting piece of code in Windows CRT source. So far I have been using the code below to determine if an executable is managed or native. Basically I am just checking for the presence of IMAGE_DIRECTORY_ENTRY_COM_DESCRIPTOR Data Directory entry in PE headers. int CheckCLRHeader(PBYTE pbFile) { PIMAGE_DOS_HEADER […]
While debugging a reasonably complex .NET application, many times you may come across a situation where you want to know which different methods have subscribed to your event. If you are using VS2005 or VS2008 then DebuggerTypeProxyAttribute, a relatively unknown feature of Visual Studio, comes to your rescue. For a long time Visual Studio has […]
If you wanted to learn advanced debugging of .NET application using WinDBG but didn’t know where to start, look no further. Tess Ferrandez has started posting debugging labs to teach you how to debug tough problems. Her blog has invaluable tips about debugging real world problems. She has posted real world case studies and explained […]
Ghazal is a form of poetry that was introduced to India by the Moghuls in the 12th century. While Ghazals can be written in any language, in India it is more popularly written in Urdu, Hindi and Gujarati. When it comes to Gujarati Ghazals, the city of Surat is considered the front runner with the […]
This issue with the dual monitor setup in Vista has been bugging me a lot. I have 2 19″ Westinghouse monitors that have DVI and VGA inputs. I have an ATI Radeon 9200 video card that has a DVI and a VGA output. The left monitor (primary) is connected using DVI and the right one […]
I recently wrote about the impact of DEP on .NET applications due to changes in the .NET Framework 2.0 SP1. A couple of days later I came across Michael Howard’s post about new APIs related to DEP. As Michael points out, in Windows Vista SP1, Windows XP SP3 and Windows Server 2008, it is possible […]
When a function is exported from a DLL the compiler will decorate or mangle the function name. To export the undecorated function name the linker needs an export definition file (.DEF). A while back I was working on a project in Java that calls functions from a DLL using JNI. I had created a DLL […]
This topic has been written about but not as much as it should have been. Hence, I am repeating it here again. It will also serve as a future reference for me. DEP stands for Data Execution Prevention. It is a hardware based feature supported by Intel as well as AMD processors that disables execution […]