One feature that I was missing of late was the concept of hierarchical breakpoints.
Often during debugging I want the debugger to break in some method or function but only coming from an specific path.

To give you an example:

void some_function() {
/* breakpoint here */
}
 
void some_other_function() {
/* breakpoint here */
    some_function();
}
 
int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
    some_function();
    some_other_function();
    return 0;
}

What I’d like to do now is to break in “some_function” but only coming from “some_other_function”.
In this easy example I could happily press F5 a couple of times and be done with it. I could also use the breakpoints hit-counter to accomplish that goal.
But for more complex software this quickly becomes unpractical.

Luckily for me Visual Studio provides an rich extension framework.

You see two breakpoints in the image above. By Draging’n'Droping the breakpoint in line 7 on the one in line 11 the one in line 7 got disabled. Once the program hits line 11 during a debug run the AddIn will in turn enable all child breakpoints (the one in line 7 in this case).

tutorial

We have created a quick tutorial video here.

download

You can download the project (source only) from sourceforge. Drop me a visit at ohloh if you like the software.

On that note, I’d like to point you to an interesting link where you will find a coding standard generator. After choosing from a lot of options your will end up with an generated document that can serve pretty well as a draft four your own needs.

To make compliance with that standard easier for me and my fellow co-workers, I have created an astyle configuration file and let astyle (A Free, Fast and Small Automatic Formatter) run over my code every time I create a build (visual studio pre-build event). At least for my current project, the amount of time needed for the tool to crawl all my files does not become noticeable on my machine.

For sure astyle is no silver bullet. There where a couple of incidents where code wasn’t correctly formatted (at least not by our definition) and we would have to customize the tool a bit. Changing astyle to fit your needs however is pretty straight forward. What you gain however is that everybody is more or less free to code as he is used to. The result will always conform to the same standard since everybody’s code is formatted after a predefined set of rules.

At least for us this approach proved beneficial.

Update: now supports https connections.

< ?php
 
// determine if connections to other servers
// are to be allowed. change this password! seriously!
$allow_foreign = ( $_GET['proxy_pass'] == 'master_password' );
 
$url = parse_url( $_GET['feed'] );
// connect to an ssl encrypted site?
$use_ssl = $url['scheme'] == "https";
 
// determine the port to use based on passed URL
if( ! isset( $url['port'] ) ) {
	$port = ($use_ssl ? 443 : 80);
} else {
	$port = $url['port'];
}
 
// determine the host to connect to.
// only allow connections to servers other
// than localhost when the proxy_pass has been
// correctly passed.
if( $allow_foreign ) {
	$host = $url['host'];
} else {
	$host = "127.0.0.1";
}
 
// is this supposed to be an ssl connection?
// then use the ssl protocol.
if( $use_ssl ) {
	$host = "ssl://".$host;
}
 
// try to open a connection to the requested host
$fh = fsockopen( $host, $port );
if( $fh ) {
	fwrite( $fh, "GET ".$url['path']." HTTP/1.0\r\n" );
	// in case we deal with virtual hosts pass the domain we are interested in.
	fwrite( $fh, "Host: ".$url['host']."\r\n" );
	// rfc2617: basic authorization header plus base64 encoded username:password
	fwrite( $fh, "Authorization: Basic ".base64_encode($_GET['user'].":".$_GET['pass'])."\r\n" );
	// end of the request header
	fwrite( $fh, "\r\n" );
	 // practically ignore all answering headers send by the server
	while( ! feof( $fh ) && ($debug = fgets( $fh )) != "\r\n" ) /*echo $debug*/;
	// display only the body of the message
	while( ! feof( $fh ) ) {
		echo fgets( $fh );
	}
	fclose( $fh );
}
 
?>

Piece of advice:

• Please note that if you use this in your web-browser your username/password might accidentally end up in some peoples web-server logs when your browser passes the reffer header around.
• Change “master_password” to something secure. Otherwise you will open your server as a proxy to others to do all kinds of nasty things under your IP address.  If you don’t provide the “proxy_pass” parameter when you invoke the URL later you will only be able to access the local server where your script is placed!
• If your script is publicly accessible you also might want to change the ($url['port'] ? $url['port'] : 80) part to always point to “80″.

How to use the script:

Save the script to your webserver. You can now invoke your protected? HTTP web resource via:
script_name.php?feed=[URL_TO_QUERY]&user=[YOUR_USERNAME]&pass=[YOUR_PASSWORD]

f.ex.:

http://www.default-route.de/proxy.php?feed=http://www.google.com/&user=myname&pass=mypassword

References:

rfc2617 – HTTP Authentication: Basic and Digest Access Authentication
basic authentication – article on wikipedia

Cheers.

Again there is little to be gathered from the Microsoft documentation as it’s not very specific on this topic (at least I’m unable to find anything in an reasonable amount of time).

To increase the amount of memory available to the NTFS start up the command line with administrator privileges.
The command fsutil behavior query memoryusage will show you the current setting of your system with “0″ or “1″ being the default behavior.

from the documentation of fsutil: … Configures the internal cache levels of NTFS paged pool and NTFS non-paged pool memory. Set to 1 or 2. When set to 1 (the default), NTFS uses the default amount of paged pool memory. When set to 2, NTFS increases the size of its lookaside lists and memory thresholds. A lookaside list is a pool of fixed-size kernel memory buffers that the kernel and device drivers create as private memory caches for file system operations, such as reading a file. …

So, changing the value to “2″ should tell the NTFS handler to use more memory. To do that we make use of our administrative console again:
fsutil behavior set memoryusage 2



Alternatively you can change the setting in the registry directly using regedit.

As of yet, I for myself have to see if the change of settings actually does something noticeable. If you have gained some experience (positive or bad) feel free to comment. I’d love to hear from you.

For the rest of us I have written a little tool (md5 windowreset.exe bff8b54a89a188793eb9b6bfbe9e8526) which tries to detect all off-screen windows and dialogs and moves them to the primary display.

edit (thanks hans):
another (not well known) option that works at least for windows that appear in the windows taskbar is to right click the offending window and to choose “move” from the context menu. Now you can use your arrow keys to navigate the window to the primary display. Again, this will not work for some dialogs that appear off screen.

Usage: when you start the program it will open in an console window. While running it will try to move all windows and dialogs that are currently outside the visible desktop to the primary screens upper-left point.