Debugging
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We recently made an offer available to members of the Autodesk Developer Network, to get a 10% discount on the purchase price of .NET Reflector Pro, a tool I've talked about a few times before. Having discussed this with Red Gate Software, the providers of .NET Reflector Pro, I'm now extending this offer to readers of this blog. For a limited time only – until the end of May 2010 – you can also purchase .NET Reflector Pro at a 10% discount. I've found this tool to be very useful, especially when working with AutoCAD's .NET API. For more information…
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This question has popped up a few times since Visual Studio 2010's recent launch. I received it by email overnight from Roland Cox, which is interesting as I'd already planned this post for today. Do you know how to debug AutoCAD and a custom add in using Visual Studio 2010? What settings do I need to make? I know the add is getting loaded (the code runs in AutoCAD) but I can't set a breakpoint (it shows a empty circle saying that VS doesn't have the assembly loaded). I first saw this issue raised a few times on threads with…
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Well, they've done it again. Having received positive feedback on Episode 1, Stephen and Fenton have now recorded another ADN DevCast, this time with a guest appearance of another member of the DevTech team, Cyrille Fauvel. During this episode they talk about disposing in .NET, diagnosing DLL load problems using gflags, and deepcloning in ObjectARX. If you prefer you can download this episode for offline viewing (36 MB) and take a look at the accompanying samples (95KB). Enjoy! 🙂
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You may or may not be aware that my team, DevTech, writes and publishes DevNotes on the ADN website, answers support questions submitted by ADN members using a tool we call DevHelp Online, records DevTV sessions, participates in events known as DevLabs, talks about our upcoming products at DevDays and delivers API training. (Seems like we need to get the branding police to work on that last one. 🙂 So, in keeping with our theme we have started a new activity… I'm proud (and not unamused, which is putting it mildly) to announce our first DevCast. Recorded recently by Stephen…
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In the first post in this series we looked at the basic (and free) capabilities of the upcoming version 6 of .NET Reflector. Today we'll look at the "Pro" capabilities, which integrate decompilation with debugging of 3rd party assemblies. To get started, we should see a new ".NET Reflector" toolbar inside our Visual Studio installation. On it, we should see a "Choose Assemblies to Debug…" option: This option launches an analysis of our currently open solution, to understand the assemblies that have been referenced inside it: One very important thing to note: for Reflector to work, you must have assembly…
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As many of you will know, by now, I'm a big fan of Reflector. I've used it for quite some time, since its early days as a piece of freeware developed by Lutz Roeder, and overall it's proven to be an extremely valuable tool. When a UK-based company, Red Gate Software, acquired the Reflector technology back in 2008, I was curious as to their strategy for monetizing it (and it seems I wasn't alone in speculating on the direction the tool would take as a commercial offering). Well, that's now starting to become clear with the Beta release of .NET…
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Just a quick reminder about the DevLabs my team is running, the first of which is being held next week in our UK office. Here's some additional information that was sent out in a recent technical newsletter for ADN members: If you don't have time to attend a training class, but you value the opportunity to work on your code with the help of an Autodesk expert, then DevLab is for you. Bring your laptop to our FREE DevLab and work on your code as you normally – the difference is that you have a team of DevTech experts (the…
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My team is trying out a new concept over the coming months, something we're calling DevLabs. The idea is that we schedule a period where members of my team are available in a particular Autodesk office to sit down with people working on their development projects. (The concept is new for us, at least: I know Google does something similar with their Hackathons.) Attendees can plan on dropping in for a just a day or for longer – even the whole week, if they so choose - to spend time working through development issues with members of my team. This…
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A question came in on a previous post: Hello, I write applications for Autocad Map and Civil3d platforms, mostly with ObjectARX. I would like to do more with .NET but so far the main reason preventing this is not having the NETUNLOAD command.. With arx I can just arxunload and arxload the application for modifications in a second. But with .NET I have to restart the heavy environment and do all kinds of lengthy initializations before being able to try even small changes in code, this can take a minute or more.. Maybe it is possible to create an utility,…
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While debugging it's sometimes very frustrating to find yourself repeatedly stepping into an irrelevant function. For instance, complex statements pretty commonly include object constructors etc. that you know function perfectly well, but the debugger routinely takes you into them. The Visual Studio IDE has an undocumented (and unsupported) mechanism to help with this. During the VC 6.0 timeframe it was implemented via our old friend the autoexp.dat file (see my previous post on this), in a special section called [ExecutionControl]. Since VC 7.0 this has been moved to the Registry. For VC 7.0 and 7.1, it was in the HKCU…