Skip to main content

Useful Information to make a Release Build using debug information in Visual Studio.

Make my release build a debug build

If you are in the process of development and then you notice a crash while testing release build and you don’t know where the crash is taking place, do the following…

  1. Enable debugging for your release builds
  2. Go to C-C++/Optimizations/ and select Disable(Debug). If you don’t enable this bit you will see weird behavior while debugging. For e.g. addresses show as NULL even for valid objects on stack. By the way this might even be the cause of those crashes so initially you can leave it as it is but watch out for weird behaviors, don’t be surprised.
  3. Go to C-C++/Debug Info/ and select Program Database, this will generate a pdb file.
  4. If the output for a particular project is of .lib type then this much will suffice.
  5. Now for dlls and exes, follow steps 1 - 3.
  6. Go to Link tab/section and enable “Generate debug info”, this will add further debugging information to your exe or dll. Will show real deep stack traces with values of passed in parameters.

Yup now your release exe/dll/lib is now in full fledged debugging form. An additional thing to note is that _DEBUG is not enabled so AfxTrace, TRACE, TRACE0, TRACE1, TRACE2, ASSERTs, and VERIFYs won’t work.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Explain Polymorphism and Flavors of Polymorphism...

Polymorphism is the ability of different objects to react in an individual manner to the same message. This notion was imported from natural languages. For example, the verb "to close" means different things when applied to different objects. Closing a door, closing a bank account, or closing a program's window are all different actions; their exact meaning is determined by the object on which the action is performed. Most object-oriented languages implement polymorphism only in the form of virtual functions. But C++ has two more mechanisms of static (meaning: compile-time) polymorphism: Operator overloading. Applying the += operator to integers or string objects, for example, is interpreted by each of these objects in an individual manner. Obviously, the underlying implementation of += differs in every type. Yet, intuitively, we can predict what results are. Templates. A vector of integers, for example, reacts differently from a vector of string objects when it receives ...

MFC - Microsoft Foundation Classes Design Patterns

1 Introduction This paper describes the use of object-oriented software design patterns, as presented in Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software by Gamma et al., within the Microsoft Foundation Class Library (MFC). MFC is used for implementing applications for Microsoft Windows operating systems. Because of the size of the MFC library, a complete analysis would have been beyond the scope of this assignment. Instead, we identified various possible locations for design patterns, using the class hierachy diagram of MFC, and studied the source carefully at these locations. When we did not find a pattern where we expected one, we have documented it anyway, with examples of how the particular problem could have been solved differently, perhaps more elegantly, using design patterns. We have included a brief introduction to MFC in Section 2 , as background information. The analysis has been split into three parts, with one section for each major design pattern ca...

• Why might you need exception handling be used in the constructor when memory allocation is involved?

Your first reaction should be: "Never use memory allocation in the constructor." Create a separate initialization function to do the job. You cannot return from the constructor and this is the reason you may have to use exception handling mechanism to process the memory allocation errors. You should clean up whatever objects and memory allocations you have made prior to throwing the exception, but throwing an exception from constructor may be tricky, because memory has already been allocated and there is no simple way to clean up the memory within the constructor.