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Re: Question about debugging dll [message #13712 is a reply to message #13699]

Thu, 24 January 2008 02:01

mr_ped
Messages: 826
Registered: November 2005
Location: Czech Republic - Praha

Experienced Contributor

If it is too much effort to do a helper main, then why do you even bother to debug at all?

Why are you bound to dll anyway? Maybe you can solve that dependency in other way, forget about dll, and work just on the code itself than happily.
(So far in my little U++ projects I never actually bothered what package resulted into dll and which got linked statically... it just works, and that's all I want to know about it, I want to code, not to babysit compilation tools and OS binary loader.)

If that DLL is already finished, and being called by some other process, you may use MS VisualStudio debugger to attach to that dll process. Not very easy, especially if it is compiled without debug info, I'm considering myself assembler wizard, but still I avoided anything like this for any costs, so I debugged binary code only several times in life, usually when I needed to bend some application from somebody else to do something differently.

If you are starting to code that DLL from scratch, why don't you use TDD? If the DLL interface is simple enough, you will probably not to debug it at all, if you have good enough suite of automated tests.

And one more thing. The debugger in TheIDE is very weak and incomplete. I'm not sure if I know any less powerful debugging tool. It's usually enough to detect place of problem, but impossible to do very basic (debugger) things like to modify memory/code, and watches are not persistent, etc. etc...
In Luzr's eyes it's complete, but I have seen in my life many different tools so I can compare. Smile

In recent years I don't need too much those things I named anymore, as I prefer not to debug my code at all, I rather understand what I write and let the rest of bugs to be discovered by tests, as debugging is very costly operation. But when I do, I want that tool to be total wizard so I can do some magic whenever I wish to, not just viewer over process execution to let me peek how it's going, but unable to affect anything.

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