This Masterclass was arranged for The Developers Group on 31st January, 2005 in Reading, England and for Moonsoft in Helsinki, Finland.

Why Should I Attend?

Debugging is something all developers have to contend with. The facilities in your favourite development tool are typically sufficient for most issues encountered, but sometimes a little more breadth can be important in bringing a problem to a quick conclusion. This session will look at various debugging techniques and tools starting with an overview of the familiar and rapidly branching out into what is, for the average developer, the unknown. Focus is spread across debugging both Win32 systems and .NET systems, looking at available tools and techniques to add to your arsenal.

What Will I See?

The agenda is planned to look like this. After an introduction, in the first half we will look at Win32 debugging: :

• Introduction
• Win32 Debugging
• Overview
• Tracing & logging – here we look at interesting possibilities to help this common requirement in following logic flow
• Memory management
• Memory leaks – looking at mechanisms & tools to help with this issue
• Memory fragmentation & memory managers
• Exceptions in the field
• Heisenbugs & Bohr bugs
• The CPU window & how to make it useful
• Microsoft debuggers & their problems
• Multi-process debugging
• Image file execution options & their applications

The second half switches focus to .NET:

• .NET Debugging
• Overview
• The various Microsoft debuggers, their purposes and use
• Useful image & execution analysis tools
• Memory management
• Memory leaks, their manifestation & identification in .NET
• Memory fragmentation & memory managers
• Heisenbugs & Bohr bugs
• Interop systems
• Miscellaneous issues
• Performance issues
• Profiling .NET applications
• Writing your own .NET profiler

The day will be informal and pertinent questions during the sections are welcomed.

What Will I Know When I Leave?

Attendees of this masterclass will get the benefit of the years of experience Brian Long has had in debugging other people’s problems in Win32 and .NET. You will have a wider appreciation for techniques and approaches that can help in debugging the more tricky issues that arise in software development and be introduced to a variety of tools that can be helpful in pinpointing the causes of elusive problems, both for Win32 and .NET.