2024-02-26 15:11
If you’ve installed any of our commercial tools (not evaluation versions) before January 26 2024, then enabled automatic updates and tried to update your software via the automatic sof… Read More
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Perfect Imprecision, Thoughts On Memory Leaks, Per Blog
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Blog about software engineering problems, their cause, solutions using software tools and non-tool solutions.
2023-11-24 14:27
The problem
I needed an easy way to automate the building of a Visual Studio project from the command line. It needed to work regardless of which Visual Studio the project file was from. Vis… Read More
2023-11-13 21:23
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2023-10-25 15:23
Everything written here applies to all Validators: Bug, Coverage, Memory, Performance and Thread.
There are many ways to start collecting data with a Validator: Launch, Inject, Wait, Service… Read More
2023-09-14 18:18
Bugs are an unfortunate part of being a software developer. Sooner or later you’re going to bump into one and need to ask the vendor for help in dealing with the bug, whether there is… Read More
2023-09-14 18:14
In this article I’m going to explain how we provide customer support.
Free
Customer support is free. There is no charge for customer support.
Customer support is provided on a first co… Read More
2023-09-14 17:42
Minidumps can be really useful for creating a self-contained record of a crash for analysis later, either by your own software team, by a consultant, or by a software tool vendor.
In this ar… Read More
2023-09-14 15:00
When collecting data to submit for a bug report, collecting a callstack and supporting data is a common task.
In this article I’m going to explain how to collect a callstack, module li… Read More
2023-09-13 14:30
We recently had a bug in one of our tools that passed all memory leak tests (it didn’t leak memory) but in real-life use with large datasets would exhibit memory usage as if it had a m… Read More
2023-09-13 12:14
This was written a few years ago, but only posted 13 September 2023.
A few years ago I attended the funeral of a 96 year old man. Mr Jim Terry.
I did not know Jim very well. I had met him on… Read More
2023-09-13 12:09
Recently Intel introduced the One Mono font, which is intended to reduce eye strain and to be superior for use by people with vision difficulties.
Sounds great. What puzzled me was that I co… Read More
2023-09-01 13:18
In an ideal world software would never crash.
In the real world, software crashes. Hopefully infrequently.
Our tools write an exception report when they crash. The user interface writes exce… Read More
2023-08-15 15:08
Batch files are often used to setup an environment prior to starting an executable. You can also do this with Powershell scripts.
If you use batch files and/or Powershell scripts to do this… Read More
2023-08-15 12:38
If you’ve ever tried to run a script from Powershell you’ve probably seen this error message.
Enabling script execution
To enable script execution in Powershell open an administ… Read More
2023-08-11 08:14
The problem
I needed an easy way to automate the building of a Visual Studio solution from the command line.
I have a process that consists of 8 separate tasks, each of which consists of mul… Read More
2023-07-25 08:55
In this article, we’re going to discuss how to manually install a licence without reinstalling the software.
Why would I want to do this?
The main reason for wanting to reinstall the l… Read More
2023-05-18 08:35
When working with IIS it’s not uncommon to run into problems with pages not being served correctly.
When this happens you’re shown an error page with lots of text and a rather in… Read More
2023-04-12 17:02
If you’re working with IIS there is a high likelihood that at some point you’ll want to write data to a log file and/or enable permissions for DLLs and or executables to run in a… Read More
2022-12-19 12:55
The Win32 function VirtualAlloc() can be used to allocate new blocks of committed memory. When this happens a new block that is large enough to satisfy the memory requirement is allocated. C… Read More
2022-11-30 13:12
Memory leaks affect all computer programs, be they desktop applications, service applications or web services. For many trivial applications or applications with a very short application lif… Read More
2022-11-30 13:12
Memory leaks affect all computer programs be they desktop applications, service applications or web services. For many trivial applications or applications with a very short application life… Read More
2022-11-30 13:12
Memory leaks affect all computer programs be they desktop applications, service applications or web services. For many trivial applications or applications with a very short application life… Read More
2022-11-18 16:27
We’ve just released Memory Validator 9.63.
This release introduces improvements for viewing trending statistics by allocator type.
The Job To Be Done behind these changes is making it… Read More
2022-09-06 11:53
In a previous article I explained how to preserve the x64 floating point registers.
In this article I’m going to provide some code that allows you preserve the x64 floating point regis… Read More
2022-09-06 11:53
Last week I had the pleasure to attend a conference organised by Cambridge Wireless at Cambridge University Møller Centre, Cambridge. The event was free to attend and sponsored by EED… Read More
2022-09-05 12:55
Many software engineers and their managers struggle to understand what memory fragmentation is and the effects memory fragmentation can have on the software they produce. The side effects wi… Read More
2022-04-04 13:32
Last week we introduced the command line builder to all our Validator tools – Bug Validator, Coverage Validator, Memory Validator, Performance Validator and Thread Validator.All our to… Read More
2022-02-28 18:31
Environment variables can be used to configure the various Validator tools that we provide. Configuration provides flexibility, but it also provides avenues for failure. In this article I&rs&hell…Read More
2022-02-14 15:44
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2022-01-28 15:33
If you write software for any length of time you’ll have seen your software fail in a variety of ways.Exceptions are a common cause of application failure.Exceptions are also used to h… Read More
2022-01-11 15:09
When Windows encounters an error condition that might compromise the security of the computer, the program that encounters that condition is terminated as fast as possible. This is done via… Read More
2021-12-14 10:33
We’ve had a few inquiries from worried customers as to whether we use log4j and what our mitigation plan is if we do.
Good news: We don’t use log4j. Our website doesn’t use… Read More
2021-11-26 19:15
You’ve been given a program to debug. You’ve got the EXE and DLLs, and you’ve got the PDB files, so you can tell when the filenames, line numbers and symbol names are.
So f… Read More
2021-10-29 12:52
In this blog post I’m going to give you an example for running .Net unit tests with NUnit and Coverage Validator. It’s the same process for .Net Core and C++.
I’m going to… Read More
2021-10-26 09:33
In this blog post I’m going to give you an example for running .Net Core tests with VS Test and Coverage Validator. It’s the same process for regular .Net and C++.
First, let&rsq&hell…Read More
2021-06-05 14:08
This article was written by myself in 2000/2001 and was originally hosted on a different website that no longer exists.
I have updated this with some extra information and fixed many typos… Read More
2021-05-11 11:59
If you are reading this web page it is most likely because you have just tried to inject into a running process and the injection failed. You’ve probably just viewed an information dia… Read More
2021-04-14 17:43
For most uses of GetProcAddress() the address returned will be an address inside the DLL that you’re using to lookup the function.
But sometimes the address returned is not in the DLL… Read More
2020-12-10 18:27
There are some changes coming to Thread Validator.
I’m going to describe the various changes and the reasons behind them.
Name Change
The first one is the name change. C++ Thread Valid… Read More
2020-12-10 18:26
There are many changes coming to Performance Validator.
I’m going to describe the various changes and the reasons behind them.
Name Change
The first one is the name change. C++ Perform… Read More
2020-12-10 18:26
There are many changes coming to Memory Validator.
I’m going to describe the various changes and the reasons behind them.
Name Change
The first one is the name change. C++ Memory Valid… Read More
2020-12-10 18:26
There are many changes coming to Coverage Validator.
I’m going to describe the various changes and the reasons behind them.
Name Change
The first one is the name change. C++ Coverage V… Read More
2020-12-08 11:49
We’ve been working on a new, calmer UX Theme for a while.
The aim is to reduce the number of lines, have less visual clutter, better demarcation of boundaries, consistent colour use ac… Read More
2020-06-12 11:59
We’ve changed the display of data on all of our tree controls that are used to display callstacks and call trees.
The old method of display, everything was displayed in black text at n… Read More
2020-06-01 09:37
A memory leak in a surprising place
We’ve recently been doing some work switching our resources in our programs from BMP (using CBitmap) to PNG (using CPngImage).
At some point we got… Read More
2020-04-21 11:51
Three weeks ago I wrote about how to setup IIS for use with ISAPI extensions.
Today I’m going to show you how easy it is to monitor memory and handle allocations in IIS, and use that i… Read More
2020-04-03 11:27
Introduction
OK so it’s 2020 and how many people are developing ISAPI extensions? More than you might imagine. Yeah Ruby on Rails and Rust are all the rage these days, but some people… Read More
2020-03-06 16:49
Setting the scene
I wrote this several years ago but it never became published. Reading it now it still seems to be valid. Even more so with coronavirus in the news.
Odds are that if you ar… Read More
2020-03-06 16:24
Multithreading is a powerful way to improve the processing throughput and responsiveness of your software. We use it to great effect at Software Verify. In order to manage multithreading suc… Read More
2020-03-06 12:48
If you’re using Delphi or 32 bit C++ Builder your compiler/linker produces symbols in TDS format. TDS means Turbo Debugger Symbols – it’s an old naming convention from the… Read More
2020-03-06 11:45
In a previous article I wrote about how to identify crashes in the Windows Event Log.
You need to use the Windows Event Viewer, inspect each entry looking for some keywords then decode the X… Read More
2020-02-12 16:43
It’s an unfortunate and inevitable fact that while developing software sometimes your software will crash. This also happens, sometimes, hopefully very infrequently, in production code… Read More
2020-02-11 17:21
Debugging services is a pain. There is a lot that can go wrong and very little you can do to find out what went wrong. Perfect! Just what you need for an easy day at work. Services run in a… Read More
2019-08-24 08:43
We’ve just released another of our in-house tools – Exception Tracer.
Exception Tracer started off life as an experiment and then through a series of needing to capture debugging… Read More
2019-08-22 10:53
Since Windows Vista the Windows operating system has included functionality to iterate across the waiting objects that form a chain between threads. I’m waiting for thread A, which is… Read More
2019-07-11 13:53
It’s not uncommon for the founders of startup businesses to experience problems with motivation and problems with productivity as their business grows. I’m going to write about t… Read More
2019-07-11 10:34
We were recently asked if Memory Validator could handle monitoring a program that took it’s input from a file and wrote its’ output to a file. As shown in the following example… Read More
2019-06-19 19:21
Multi-threading is becoming quite common these days. It’s a useful way to provide a responsive user interface while performing work at the same time. Our tools report data per thread w… Read More
2019-04-18 11:00
Last week I attended my the Business of Software Europe conference. This year the conference returns to Cambridge after a few years in Dublin and London.This year the conference logo is the… Read More
2018-09-04 10:05
Working with GDI in Windows, whether you’re using Win32 calls or MFC, you’re concerned with pens, brushs, fonts, bitmaps and regions for drawing. You may also be concerned with P… Read More
2018-06-06 17:40
Introduction
We recently had a request asking if C++ Memory Validator could detect memory leaks in unit tests managed by Microsoft’s Visual Test and Visual Test Explorer. They told us… Read More
2018-05-26 09:41
Last week I attended the Business of Software Europe 2018 conference, in London, United Kingdom. It’s a great conference, for people building sustainable software businesses. If you&rs&hell…Read More
2018-05-12 10:10
Visual Studio menu support
We’ve just added support for integrating tool menus into Visual Studio. This integration supports most of our tools. The menu only shows tools that are insta… Read More
2018-03-19 12:33
Why would you ever need a tool to clean up Visual Studio? Doesn’t Visual Studio have a built in “clean” mode that cleans your build directories?
Yes, it does, but that only… Read More
2018-03-12 12:01
The problem with Solutions
If you’re working with just one solution and the projects it contains Microsoft Visual Studio is a good tool for managing the builds. Except that it won&rsqu&hell…Read More
2018-03-05 14:51
The productivity sink
Visual Studio is a very productive development environment. However, you can get Visual Studio into a state (for C++ and C developers, at least) where the compile and l… Read More
2018-02-15 14:41
When you run one of our tools for the first time it displays the first run wizard.
The first run wizard takes you through the steps of configuring a few settings that are important to the to… Read More
2018-02-06 11:16
Last week we released a versions of our tools that no longer install DLLs in the Windows system32 directory. We documented these changes in an article Changing How We Install Our Software.
I… Read More
2018-02-03 10:46
With the next release of our software (later today) we are changing how we install our software.
The installers stay the same, the software (as you see it) stays the same, but under the hood… Read More
2018-02-03 10:25
All of our Validator tools have an NT Service API.
We’ve just made some changes to the NT Service API. This article documents those changes and why we made them.
The changes to the NT… Read More
2017-12-19 12:06
This is one of several posts of the topic of security of websites. Inspired by my initial post on the security of UK banks.
The reason for splitting this data into multiple posts is to make… Read More
2017-12-18 20:04
This is one of several posts of the topic of security of websites. Inspired by my initial post on the security of UK banks.
The reason for splitting this data into multiple posts is to make… Read More
2017-12-18 16:01
This is one of several posts of the topic of security of websites. Inspired by my initial post on the security of UK banks.
The reason for splitting this data into multiple posts is to make… Read More
2017-12-15 15:53
This is one of several posts of the topic of security of websites. Inspired by my initial post on the security of UK banks.
The reason for splitting this data into multiple posts is to make… Read More
2017-12-15 15:33
This is one of several posts of the topic of security of websites. Inspired by my initial post on the security of UK banks.
The reason for splitting this data into multiple posts is to make… Read More
2017-12-15 13:30
This is one of several posts of the topic of security of websites. Inspired by my initial post on the security of UK banks.
The reason for splitting this data into multiple posts is to make… Read More
2017-12-15 12:42
This is one of several posts of the topic of security of websites. Inspired by my initial post on the security of UK banks.
The reason for splitting this data into multiple posts is to make… Read More
2017-12-15 12:16
This is one of several posts of the topic of security of websites. Inspired by my initial post on the security of UK banks.
The reason for splitting this data into multiple posts is to make… Read More
2017-12-15 11:42
This is one of several posts of the topic of security of websites. Inspired by my initial post on the security of UK banks.
The reason for splitting this data into multiple posts is to make… Read More
2017-12-13 15:02
Not the usual software post today. Something about website security, because that affects everyone. In particular I’m going to talk about the security of online banks and related organ… Read More
2017-05-31 17:43
In this blog post I’m going to explain how to collect code coverage for a process that is launched by another process. We’ll be using C++ Coverage Validator to collect the code c… Read More
2017-05-12 12:01
We’ve just updated our documentation for all our Validator tools to include an up to date list of Exit return codes. You may find these useful if you’re running these tools from… Read More
2017-01-31 13:00
If you’ve ever developed an MFC program with a graphical user interface and then later thought that it would be really nice to also provide a command line version with output to stdout… Read More
2016-12-20 17:06
C++ Performance Validator has always had the ability to provide timing information for each line executed. However it has always been a bit clumsy to use – you could only enable line t… Read More
2016-12-20 12:35
We introduced the Software Updates menu in 2012. This coincided with the introduction of automatic software updates. Various bug fixes have been applied to the software update software since… Read More
2016-12-20 11:33
We’ve just added a new Startup Wizard to all our C++ tools.
The purpose of the startup wizard is to unify the various different dialogs that would be shown the first time the software… Read More
2016-12-14 17:57
We’ve had a few people asking how to configure C++ Memory Validator to work with programs built using Dev C++. Dev C++ is an IDE used for developing programs with the MingW compiler.
W… Read More
2016-11-30 13:41
After writing for Microsoft’s Windows platform for 20 years I thought I knew all I could know about GetFileAttributes(). Until I found a rather odd and subtle bug in some code that int… Read More
2016-11-29 10:35
A few years ago Microsoft introduced support for very high resolution monitors. Such monitors might have nearly 4000 pixels horizontally and over 2000 pixels vertically. This provides wonder… Read More
2016-11-28 15:29
Hi,
It’s been a while since we posted anything on the blog. If you weren’t a customer, regularly receiving our software update emails you might think we weren’t going anyt… Read More
2015-09-06 09:26
Recently we’ve had a few customers contact to tell us they have experienced a dramatic reduction in speed when using C++ Memory Validator.
We found this puzzling as we hadn’t re… Read More
2015-07-23 16:16
We’ve just changed how we launch executables and attach to them at launch time. We’ve also changed how we inject into running executables. This blog post outlines the changes and… Read More
2015-01-04 20:25
Starting with our first software release of 2015, we will start shipping software that uses the Visual Studio 2010 C runtime and MFC libraries. The purpose of this article is to explain why… Read More
2014-12-30 11:57
A few weeks ago @BobWalsh asked on twitter how to be more productive.
I dashed off a simple reply about turning various things off. I thought I’d expand upon this topic.
Productivity i… Read More
2014-10-06 20:42
Business of Software Conference 2014
In September I travelled to Boston, MA in the USA for the 2014 Business of Software Conference. As conferences go I think Business of Software is quite s… Read More
2014-08-12 15:54
A few months ago Microsoft released the Community Technology Preview of Visual Studio 2014, also known as Visual Studio 2014 CTP.
Installation
Because this is a community technology preview… Read More
2006-06-07 11:16
We’ve just released a V6.54 of C++ Memory Validator. This contains a bug fix for FALSE positive memory leak reports when working with Release mode builds of programs built using Visual… Read More
2006-06-07 11:16
We’ve just introduced some new visualisations of performance data into C++ Performance Validator and .Net Performance Validator. The new visualisations make it much easier to understan… Read More
2006-06-07 11:16
We’ve recently added support for the Marmalade game SDK to C++ Memory Validator. This article will show you how to configure a Marmalade project for use with C++ Memory Validator, how… Read More
2006-06-07 11:16
Coverage Validator has an option to automatically merge the coverage results of the current session with a central session. This allows you to get an automatic overview of all code coverage… Read More
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