How to Find the Source of Memory Leaks

When you run your (unmanaged/C++) application in debugger, you see at the end a report of memory leaks (if any are detected). Something like this: Detected memory leaks! Dumping objects -> f:\dd\vctools\vc7libs\ship\atlmfc\src\mfc\strcore.cpp(141) : {381} normal block at 0x001FFC30, 54 bytes long. Data: < x > 0C 00 B9 78 12 00 00 00 12 00 … Read more

COM Apartments

If you work with COM, apartments is one of the concepts you must comprehend, because it’s an important topic. Before explaining what apartments are let’s think about classes and objects regardless of COM. When you build a class, you know (or you should) whether objects of that class will be used from a single thread, … Read more

VSBuildStatusAddin with Auto Show and Auto Hide

A new version (1.3) of VSBuildStatus add-in for Visual Studio 2005, 2008 and 2010 is available. It allows you to configure the add-in window to automatically show up when a build/clean/deploy process starts, and/or automatically close when the operation ends. To enable the automatic show of the add-in window when a build/clean/deploy operation starts, check … Read more

COM and Registry

If you are working with COM there are several registry entries that are important and that you need to understand. I will try in this post to clarify them. But before that, let’s enumerate the three possible COM server scenarios. (As a side note, a COM server is a DLL or EXE can contains one … Read more

Playing With Fire

Congratulations to Paula Seling and Ovi who won the 3rd place in the Eurovision Song Contest 2010. I linked the winning song too, but I think we could have actually won this year. The good things is that unlike previous years, the best songs ended at the top, even if the preferences order differs from … Read more

Visma Developer Days 2010

I am currently in Oslo for Visma Developer Days 2010, a conference for developers and QAs within Visma R&D and partners, which ended today. There were about 300 people here from five countries. I’ve attended very interesting keynotes on open software, HTML5, Silverlight 4, DITA and Documentation 2.0 and presentation on various topics, ranging from … Read more