I’ve talked before about System.Threading.SynchronizationContext, as well as BeginInvoke/InvokedRequired/IsHandleCreated. In a multi-threaded Windows Forms application they can easily be mis-used, introducing difficult to find bugs.
One such not-so-subtle bug (application hang) is particularly nasty, and is described fairly well here. Distilled down, the application hangs, usually when the computer comes out of sleep mode, unlocks, or [...]

A while ago I "released" the Symbol Server Transaction Manager. It was a binaries-only, quick-and-dirty GUI wrapper utility I wrote on top of the symstore.exe command-line tool, at the prompting of John Robbins. If you’re not familiar with Symbol Servers, symstore.exe, or John Robbins, get up to speed by reading John’s still-relevant 2002 Bugslayer article [...]

Part of the recent Mastering .NET Debugging course I took covered setting up and using Microsoft’s Symbol Server technology – something that’s been around for a while, but yet many people don’t do it. While it’s incredibly useful to have a symbol server set up to contain operating system symbols (the LAN is faster than [...]

This was probably my favorite Visual Studio 2005 tip I learned in the Mastering .NET Debugging class I recently took. John Robbins is awesome. This tip lets you set a breakpoint at any arbitrary location – no source code required! Think framework library, or 3rd party library, or any commonly called code (that [...]

I just completed Wintellect’s “Mastering .NET Debugging” 2-day online course, led by “Bugslayer” John Robbins. John is a debugging wizard! But everybody already knew that. It’s always amazing to watch an expert make something difficult look easy, and he certainly does that. For hours on end he “spewed” (in a good way) great information, tips, and [...]