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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Visual Studio 2008 has a new feature called Multi-Targeting which allows developers to create applications that use different versions of .NET Framework using the same IDE. This feature has caused quite a bit of confusion among developers. Let me explain what the reason is for this confusion. Up until .NET Framework 2.0 the version of […]
For those living their lives in Reflector this is very welcome news. Microsoft has released source code of .NET Framework. Shawn Burke has detailed instructions on how to configure VS2008 to use symbols and be able to download source on the fly while debugging. Lot of people have blogged about this. However, some may still […]