John Robbins

Before I get into the quick new features for Paraffin 3.13 (download here), I need to ask for your help. Pretty much from the first day I released Paraffin, I've been consistently getting the following question: I want to be...

Have you ever tried to figure out why your MSBuild-based build is failing? While the diagnostic output is OK, it really isn't an each task (no pun intended) to debug what's going on in an MSBuild file with the traditional...

Here’s my latest script for setting up a user’s_NT_SYMBOL_PATH environment variable as well as Visual Studio 2010’s symbolsettings. In a previous version of this script, I wasn’t setting the publicsymbol server cache directory in Visual Studio so you could end...

AT&T has finally enabled internet tethering so you can use your iPhone as a 3G connection. Those of you outside the US that have had iPhone tethering for years can feel free to laugh all you want now. Anyway, the...

As I was waiting for a minidump I was grabbing on a very large and busy server application to finish writing, my mind wandered and I realized there were quite a few ways to grab a minidump today. Back in...

Remote debugging in Visual Studio works great if both machines are on the same domain and/or workgroup. It also works dreamily if you're doing straight native C++ where you can use the TCP/IP as the debugging transport. The problem comes...

If you haven't guessed by now from my blog, I have a little bit of a passing interest in PowerShell these days. Hal Rottenburg from PowerScripting Podcast will be interviewing me about PowerShell and how it applies to developers. Of...

The other day I wrote about using SYMCHK.EXE from the Debugging Tools for Windows (WinDBG) install to pre-populate your symbol server cache. That prompted a question I got in email: Our test lab machines are isolated from the rest of...

Symbol Servers are one of the best things that have ever happened in Windows debugging. Having a central store for all PDB files makes the debugging experience so much better because you'll always get exact right symbols with essentially no...

Pretty much any time I write about a cool .NET only feature here on the blog I get emails or comments about how the native C++ developers are left out in the cold. There are still a lot of applications...

Wintellect is so much more than just me posting a random blog entry every once in a while. This year our big marketing focus is to offer unique and interesting content for developers. To that end we've set up our...

If you've ever talked to me or read this blog, you know I'm a passionate OneNote user. If it weren't for OneNote, I would be a random mess. One of the new features in OneNote 2010 is Linked Notes, which...

After a bit of rest and relaxation, Paraffin, my tool to make managing your Windows Installer XML (WiX) fragments easier makes a surprise appearance back on my blog. If you're not familiar with Paraffin search this blog for numerous entries....

The other day I got a question about how to start a process under the debugger and there are quite a few different ways to do that. I thought I'd discuss them all because the information about how to do...

Recently, I did a session on Advanced .NET Debugging at the Atlanta Microsoft office and it was recorded for posterity. You can catch the three part video up on Channel 9, here, here and here. Unfortunately, the sound isn't the...

Unless your internet connection died today you no doubt heard that a new version of Visual Studio released to the public today. It's a big release and one most of you will be upgrading to very shortly if you haven't...

In the past I've written about code signing and how it's not as expensive or hard to do. Today I was searching up how to add a code signing certificate to a build machine's Local Machine store and ran across...

Working on my PowerShell for Developers presentation I'm doing at our upcoming Devscovery Conference in NYC (April 27-29) it was a no brainer to use Jeffrey Snover's excellent Start-Demo script (much improved by Joel Bennett). If you're a bad typist...

This is not a technical post, but one that bumps into business. Yes, occasionally us software developers have to lift our heads up and see that there's more to life than hacking code. This is especially true at small companies,...

Half the battle when tracking down memory problems in a .NET application is seeing the reference chain so you can see why an object is still in use. You can use SOS and its !gcroot command to track them down,...

This weekend I purchased a Samsung N110 netbook and slapped Windows 7 on that thing as fast as I could. The install was beautiful and recognized all the devices on the machine. Giving Windows Update a whirl, I see there...

When I posted Tools We Use, there were several comments, as well as many emails asking me how I used OneNote for debugging and development. Yes, I was the one who wrote "The greatest piece of software ever written. I've...

Inside Wintellect, we've been having a big email chain about all the tools all the technical folks use. Of course, we all use Visual Studio, TFS, and have read Hanselman's phenomenal Tools List, but our question was what are the...

Edit (July 7, 2010): Get the latest version of this script here. A while ago, I wrote a PowerShell script that sets up the _NT_SYMBOL_PATH environment variable as well as Visual Studio 2008 so all the debuggers or tools that...

As I've written before, Windows 7 and Mac Pros are made for each other. Except when the Mac Pro doesn't want to wake up from sleep or restore from hibernation. That's one scary problem and I thought I'd share my...

As I mentioned before, I'm in the process of moving my life over to TFS 2010 Beta 2. I'm using the excellent WiX 3.5 Beta that plugs into Visual Studio 2010 to create my setup and I had a developer...

This entry still describes how the build numbers work, but I've updated the files and shown how to incorporate these changes into .CSPRO

One of the most important technologies used at Microsoft is Event Tracing for Windows (ETW), especially inside Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2. There's a small problem with ETW. It's beyond wonderful for the Windows team at Microsoft, but for...

Nearly everyone reading this is using a machine with multiple cores. With a basic laptop containing a dual core CPU and your average desktop with a four core CPU, we have processing power our computing ancestors could only dream about....

While some teams solve their performance problems by throwing bigger hardware at the problem, many of us really do care about creating fast code. Visual Studio 2008 Team Developer Edition and above has had a great profiler that I've used...

After getting a fresh copy of Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2, I was dying to see the amazing IntelliTrace feature. You know IntelliTrace as Historical Debugging, but consider HD as the code name. No matter what the marketing people call...

While I was hoping that VS 2010 would just install itself as soon as I downloaded the bits, they haven't quite gotten that feature working just yet. I guess the team had to leave themselves something to do in the...

Code Analysis is one of those great tools that people don't run nearly enough. I have screamed repeatedly, "Never do anything at run time you can do at compile time." The best time to catch the Design Guidelines, security, and...

Go grab it and let the fun begin. See the Beta 2 home page to see what's new and how to get the bits.

Recently I was asked a question that's come up several times so I thought I'd share the answer. I've inherited a large code base that has never had FxCop run on it. When I ran the binaries through FxCop, it...

One of my favorite PowerShell scripts of all time is Jeff Hillman's Compile-Help. Instead of attempting to read the PowerShell help in a text window, Jeff's outstanding script packages up all the help into a searchable, linkified, and easy to...

On a mailing list I subscribe to, there was an interesting question, "How do you change the user information shown in the Visual Studio splash screen?" I've circled in red the user information below. As I was curious about the...

As there are still tons and tons of native C++ development going on and you need to test that code just like you do for your C# code. I've been using WinUnit, which was first introduced in a great MSDN...

If you've been reading my blog for a while, you have already seen my infatuation with using Apple hardware. With a freshly pressed copy of Apple's latest, OS X 10.6 now in my hot little hands, it was time to...

After remoting into my domain controller I recently upgraded to Server 2008 R2, I very briefly saw a balloon tip pop up that said: "Invalid Windows Activation" (or something close to that). That was odd as I was sure I...

Sam reported a bug in Paraffin where I wasn't handling the –dirref option correctly. How embarrassing! It was a quick fix so grab the updated code and binary here. As always, please let me know if you have feature suggestions...

A while ago we lost the link where I had put all the tips that ran in my Bugslayer column in Microsoft Systems Journal and MSDN Magazine. Now they're back. Here's the complete collection: https://training.atmosera.com/bugslayertips.aspx. Enjoy!

On my post about restoring with Windows Home Server, Bill Tudor had an excellent comment that I felt everyone needed to read concerning backup and restore: Don't overlook the build-in image-based backup available in the better SKU's of Vista and...

Messing around I managed to wipe out one of my machines. Fortunately, I have rock solid backups with Windows Home Server, which I highly recommend. When disaster strikes, all you need to do is pop in the WHS Restore CD,...

In my article on Easier Multithreaded Debugging, there was a great question in the comments from GregM: < p style="margin-left:36pt">John, how about a way to make VS automatically attach to any children spawned by the process(es) being debugged? The short...

Looks like many people liked my macros that made multithreaded debugging easier. One of the comments on the article from Sam was worth exploring deeper: John, Great post! Would you have any idea how to make VS do this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/837869/is-there-a-shortcut-in-vs-for-next-statement-in-current-thread...

Last week I was working at Symantec and one of the people I was working with asked me the following: "When you're debugging heavily multithreaded applicatons, Visual Studio doesn't handle it too well. You can't see multiple thread call stacks...

The estimable Raymond Chen posted a funny story today about an experience he had in Sweden. (Make sure you read Raymond's post so you can understand one of the greatest blog comments ever!) Anyway, I had to laugh out loud...

Aren't "New and Improved" the most over used, and contradictory, terms in the marketer's dictionary? How can something and be new, but yet improved because if it is improved that cancels out the new. My point is that I want...

Visual Studio 2010's Historical Debugging feature fascinates me. As you sit in the debugger, being able to move backwards while in the debugger (or attach the execution log to a bug) has to be the killer feature coming up in...

While Silverlight is a functional subset of WPF and the gap is ever narrowing, there are many features that WPF supports that Silverlight does not. Silverlight even offers a few features that WPF doesn't. Microsoft asked us to do a...

While Microsoft really wants everyone to test doing an upgrade install of Windows 7 from Vista, I don't know anyone who has because all my friends are jaded Windows developers. Having installed Win 7 RC from scratch twice on my...

Thanks for all the comments and emails about my blog entry, PDB Files: What Every Developer Must Know. There was lots of nice feedback, but more importantly great questions! Instead of responding in the blog comments to these questions as...

As I have written in the past, I have a bit of a "love-hate" relationship with Lenovo and their ThinkPad line, but its way more on the love side because their hardware utterly rocks. As it was getting time for...

As I've written in the past, I've been using VMware (both Workstation 6.5 and Server 1.04) for what seems like ages. They've served me well but I wanted to be prepared for two changes coming up this year. The first...

Missed Devscovery NYC? See the Keynote! If you couldn't make it to NYC last week to have a blast at Devscovery, we missed you. One of the most interesting parts was Scott Hanselman's keynote on Social Networking for Developers. Scott,...

In the last two weeks I've gotten many questions about how to automate and program the exception handling the Visual Studio debugger so I thought I'd show how to some cool macros I've created to make it easy. If you're...

If you're not running a 64-bit version of Windows, I bet that at least one of your customers is. While you should be working on porting your native applications to 64-bit, it doesn't look like that many teams have made...

Whenever I teach a debugging class, the first thing I talk about is one of the most important points I make though the entire class: read Steve McConnell's masterpiece, Code Complete 2nd Edition. I ask for an honest show of...

At the 2008 PDC, I finally was able to meet the people behind one of my favorite products, NCover. As I'm passionate, (some would say a zealot!) about code coverage, having a great tool like NCover in the market is...

Edit Feb. 20, 2009: Note that Microsoft has fixed ADPlus with the 6.11.1.402 version of the Debugging Tools for Windows. Use that version instead of my version posted here. Windows 7 has been working quite well for me and the...

After installing Windows 7, I also installed the Windows 7 SDK as I wanted to poke around the updated headers and documentation files to see what was new at a low level. Additionally, I wanted to make sure all my...

After many, many requests, we are offering my Mastering Windows Debugging class as a virtual session on February 3 and 4, 2009. The world still runs on native C++ Windows applications so if are designing and debugging those hard core...

It's been a whole three days that I've been using Windows 7 so that makes me an expert. (Just kidding!) However, since I was able to grab my copy before Microsoft faced server death, thank you MSDN Subscription, it's given...

I'm knee deep in setting up my Lenovo X60 Tablet with Windows 7 and my initial impressions are extremely positive. The fact that all the drivers for my laptop were in the install except for the fingerprint reader and the...

If you're an MSDN Subscriber, you've got a little present waiting for you at http://msdn.microsoft.com/subscriptions. Both the x86 and x64 versions of Windows 7 Beta! It's wonderful to see that Microsoft is back to generating excitement about their OS betas....

At the end of 2007, I made a New Year's resolution to start using PowerShell as my command window. Amazingly, that's the only resolution I've ever kept in my life! Shocking, isn't it? What's even better is that by using...

Congratulations to the WiX team on hitting the Beta milestone for WiX 3.0! Now that code and schema changes are on the ramp down on the project, I thought it was the time to update my Paraffin tool to offer...

Just when you thought everything was said about the PDC, I thought I'd add a couple of notes from my perspective. I'd planned on doing this earlier, but am still recovering from all the parties and had to wait for...

While I prefer the term "particular", some (especially my wife and all my friends) would call me "anal-retentive." For example, I am, ahem, particular where my windows show up on the screen. I have all the applications I run set...

There's a ton two tons of interesting stuff coming up from the Diagnostics team in Dev10: the kind of stuff that completely changes the way you debug and tune! John Cunningham, the development manager for all diagnostic tools in Visual...

This is like my seventh PDC! My first PDC was 15 years ago in 1993 and I still have the Windows plastic slinky on my bookshelf. Anyway, I'll be at the 2008 edition of the PDC so please stop by...

While .NET gets all the press, love and attention, hard core C++ native development still pays the bills for many of us. As it's just a few days before the mass geekfest which will be all about everything .NET I...

Now that the .NET Reference Source Code for .NET 3.5 SP1 has made it up to Microsoft's servers, Kerem Kusmezer and I updated NetMassDownloader to support populating your symbol server cache directory with all the source code and symbols. Microsoft...

Eons ago in Internet years, I wrote what proved to be a very popular tool, Tester, the latest edition appeared in my second book. With it you could record and playback UI automation scripts. While Tester wasn't perfect, the number...

As the world knows, Visual Studio 2008 SP1 is out so start your download engines. I've installed it on one machine so far and I thought I'd mention a few things I found interesting. The install took exactly an hour...

On a particular Vista machine, I was setting up a PerfMon view to monitor the .NET memory performance of an application and ran into a problem. The.NET Memory # Bytes in All Heaps Performance Counter wasn't in the list of...

So there I was knee deep in a great debugging challenge. On one machine, I had set up somewhere around 15 advanced breakpoints that had all sorts of properties set such as conditionals, hit counts, and so on. As I...

If you're using WiX 2.0, my Paraffin tool can help you automate some of your setup chores. To read more about Paraffin, see the three part article, Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. Thanks to Matthew Goos who sent...

So Charles Petzold tagged me for this Software Development Meme and did that hurt. Just kidding. J It's the first time I've been tagged since I was like five years old. Anyway, here goes: How old were you when you...

Perception is everything. That applies to everything in life and certainly applies to Vista. It doesn't take much web searching to find plenty of commentary indicating that Vista has not been well received and is often downright hated. In a...

Craig Shoemaker recently interviewed me about my favorite topic, debugging, of course, for Pixel 8. We had a great time on the interview and I even got to tell one of my favorite debugging war stories. We also talked about...

The always enjoyable Jeff Atwood wrote an excellent discussion about regular expressions that everyone should read. Having seen many times where a developer will write a full blown parser instead of a regular expression, it's critical every developer spend a...

After coming back from vacation, I powered on my laptop, named BERLIN, and it took an inordinate amount of time to login. After much disk grinding, the desktop finally loaded and it wasn't my normal desktop, but a temporary desktop...

Looks like the WinDBG team was busy over the weekend and posted a new build of WinDBG: 6.9.3.113. The big fixes look like squashed bugs and performance improvements in symbol server portions. I bet you could drop those DLLs into...

You all know my geek love for Apple hardware. Yesterday Apple released the official drivers for Vista x64 support! You'll need to download and install Boot Camp Update 2.1 and you'll be set. Totally and completely excellent news!

Everyone uses Mark Russinovich's and Bryce Cogswell's excellent Sysinternals Tools. Tools like Process Explorer and Process Monitor have helped solve some of the toughest bugs I've ever worked on. I've been surprised how many people didn't know that all the...

Last year I released a tool to help make maintaining WiX 2.0-based installations easier called Paraffin. I've fixed the following two issues: I was relying on the short name of the file when generating an updated .PARAFFIN file. Sadly, it...

Recently, the computer I was using as my server started having some overheating problems. The good news is that the machine shut down before harming components, but with that machine running my domain controller I needed it running in order...

Sometimes traveling for business can be fun. As part of my job, I've been able to travel all over this wonderful planet. On my business trips I've gotten to see great sites like the Great Wall of China, Golconda Fort...

As I wrote a little bit ago my New Year's resolution was to see if I could make PowerShell my full time command shell. The good news is that after eight weeks, I'm still using PowerShell and enjoying it. As...

Kerem Kusmezer has been busy! If you've had problems with .NET Mass Downloader working behind a proxy server, version 1.2 adds the –proxy command line switch if you need to specify server, username, password, and domain. The –proxy switch uses...

The feedback and downloads for .Net Mass Downloader have been quite pleasing! Kerem and I just went through and fixed all the reported bugs so the 1.1 release is better than ever. The big fixes were that we now properly...

Microsoft has really helped out the development community by making the .NET Reference Source Code available to the community. Being able to step in the debugger from your code to the Framework code truly helps with you understanding and use...

This week I got the following question in email: I'm writing a COM component in C# that is used in Excel VBA macros. I really need to debug the VBA macro and the C# component at the same time. Is...

As I have been screaming from the roof tops, the best Vista x64 machines are Apple's Mac Pros. They are rock solid, quiet, and beautiful. Apple just announced the latest Mac Pros with up to 8 CPUs. They also snuck...

Back in October, I wrote about how I use the Volume Shadow Copy Service to backup my VMware Server virtual machines with minimal down time. I updated my batch files to have better error reporting and error handling. As always,...

Whew! I can finally talk about one of the coolest pieces of code I've seen in ages: WinUnit. About a year ago, my friend, Maria Blees showed me an idea she had for unit testing native C++ code and asked...

MSBuild has made my life so much easier that it makes me shudder thinking back to the days of NMAKE. With very little effort, I've been able to automate so much of my software build and processing that I almost...