NoStepInto on .NET 7.1

  • Thread starter Thread starter Jan Bares
  • Start date Start date
J

Jan Bares

Hi,

The NoStepInto feature seems not to work under the latest VS.NET 7.1. I even
used regmon and there was no access to 7.1\NativeDE registry key. Does it
work for you?

Regards, Jan
 
Hi Jan,

Thanks for posting in the community.

First I would like to confirm my understanding of your issue.
From your description, I understand that you noticed that the NoStepInto
feature(of the autoexp.dat) seems not to work under the latest VS.NET 7.1.

I agree with you, it also doesn't work on my side.
I will consult this issue to the product team, and reply you as soon as
possible while I get any response.


Thanks!

Best regards,

Gary Chang
Microsoft Online Partner Support

Get Secure! - www.microsoft.com/security
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
--------------------
 
Hi Jan,

The new form of the NoStepInfo feature is now in the registry with the
Visual Studio .NET.
However it doesn't work for Attached processes, that was fixed in next
Whidbey version.

Please refer to the following link to get detail information:
http://dabbler.typepad.com/ooze/2003/12/nostepinto_for_.html


Wish it helps!

Best regards,

Gary Chang
Microsoft Online Partner Support

Get Secure! - www.microsoft.com/security
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
--------------------
 
Hi Gary,

thanks for answer. Unfortunately it doesn't work. I know that the feature
was moved to registry for VC 7.0 and it worked for me well but it doesn't
work for VC7.1 (!). I have the same registry settings as for 7.0 (just the
registry is now at
HKCU/Software/Microsoft/VisualStudio/7.1/NativeDE/StepOver).
I also watched registry access and VC7.1 doesn't read the NativeDE branch at
all, please refer to my initial posting.

Thanks, Jan
 
Hi Jan,

Thanks for your quickly response!
thanks for answer. Unfortunately it doesn't work. I know that the feature
was moved to registry for VC 7.0 and it worked for me well but it doesn't
work for VC7.1 (!).
Click to expand...

We noticed that the NoStepInto feature will not be able to work with VS.NET
2003 under some platform(including Windows2000), and it is not a supported
feature by the VS.NET 2003.

However, our product team members have noticed this issue, and we are
looking at continual improvement, and it's this kind of feedback that let's
us know what things you're trying to do, that we haven't yet exposed for
you.

If there is any other feedback on our product, you can go to
http://register.microsoft.com/mswish/suggestion.asp?&SD=GN&LN=EN-US&gssnb=1
to submit it.

Thanks for your understanding!

Best regards,

Gary Chang
Microsoft Online Partner Support

Get Secure! - www.microsoft.com/security
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
--------------------
 
Gary, if you want to improve, just keep removing useful features and try to
make sure that things don't work with Windows 2000, etc. Another thing you
can do is remove as many expert friendly features that you can. Then slowly
over the years maybe you can dribble it back to the users and say "New in
Dilrod Version 2006: NoStepInto!!" "New in Idiot Version 2007: Edit and
Continue!!" "We've heard what you've been saying!" and then you can really
be heroes.

Actually, it appears you guys already have most of this figured out. You
just need to start adding the features back.

-Michael Viking

We noticed that the NoStepInto feature will not be able to work with VS.NET
2003 under some platform(including Windows2000), and it is not a supported
feature by the VS.NET 2003.

However, our product team members have noticed this issue, and we are
looking at continual improvement, and it's this kind of feedback that let's
us know what things you're trying to do, that we haven't yet exposed for
you.
Click to expand...
<SNIP>
 
We noticed that the NoStepInto feature will not be able to work with
VS.NET
2003 under some platform(including Windows2000), and it is not a supported
feature by the VS.NET 2003.
Click to expand...

On which platforms it is supported?? Why not Win2000??
I don't understand why you spent more time writting code to disable/enable
this feature on some platforms. Or is this the way how you force us
developers to install the latest version of Windows?
However, our product team members have noticed this issue, and we are
looking at continual improvement, and it's this kind of feedback that let's
us know what things you're trying to do, that we haven't yet exposed for
you.
Click to expand...

See Michael's answer.

Thanks, Jan
 
Hi Gary,

I installed WinXP and VS.NET 2003 on our test engine and the NoStepInto
works as expected. Frankly speaking I don't understand why you (MS) disabled
it for Win2k. Can you shed a light on this? Is there any reason why it was
disabled? How can I enable it?

Jan
 
Jan,

I do understand your frustration about this working on one platform and not
on another. The fact of the matter is that this is an undocumented and
unsupported feature. This was not purposefully coded to not support
Windows 2000. We have found that this does work on some Windows 2000
machines but since it is an untested feature there is no guarantee that it
will work on all systems.

This feature was removed during the migration to the new IDE from the
Visual C++ 6 IDE. They basically had to make decisions about what features
they could migrate in the initial versions of the IDE. The development
team is aware that this is a feature that developers enjoy and as I
understand it they are working to add it back to the Whidbey release of
Visual Studio.

Thanks,
Zach Kramer
Microsoft C++/C# Support Professional
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties and confers no rights.
 
Hi Zach,
I do understand your frustration about this working on one platform and not
on another. The fact of the matter is that this is an undocumented and
unsupported feature. This was not purposefully coded to not support
Windows 2000. We have found that this does work on some Windows 2000
machines but since it is an untested feature there is no guarantee that it
will work on all systems.
Click to expand...

I see no reason why it works on XP and does not on 2k (and it worked for
7.0) - code inside IDE must be written in that way. This very cute feature
is present (in undocumented for) from 6.0 IDE, I don't understand why its
still undocumented, untested and why, as you report, has bugs on some Win2k.

This feature was removed during the migration to the new IDE from the
Visual C++ 6 IDE. They basically had to make decisions about what
Click to expand...
features

No, this feature was present on 7.0 and worked for me on Win2k. With 7.1 it
works only on XP.
they could migrate in the initial versions of the IDE. The development
team is aware that this is a feature that developers enjoy and as I
understand it they are working to add it back to the Whidbey release of
Visual Studio.
Click to expand...

This little feature saves lot of time during debuggin. Please share this
feature with developers.

Thansk for your care, Jan
 
Hi Zach,

I did some assembler hacking and I can tell where the problem (most
probably) is:

The NatDbgDE.dll function CExecutionMap::LoadPatterns() loads the NoStepInto
patterns. The function calls CDebugSession::GetRegistryRoot() to get the
debugger registry root path. Inside this function I see that the output
buffer is compared for NULL and also it's size is checked against size of
the source string (9 + 0x23). But is seems that the size of output buffer is
wrong (uninitialized), on my XP it happens to be a very big number, on my
Win2k it happens to be 0. On Win2k the function returns fails because the
buffer is too small, on XP the buffer is filled. The result of function is
not checked and LoadPatterns() tries to RegOpenKeyEx() with whatever data
happens to be in memory on Win2k...this function fails and the NoStepInto
will not work.

I modified NatDbgDE.dll with "NOP" over the test for output buffer size and
now the NoStepInto works fine.

Please pass this email to someone responsible for NatDbgDE.dll code. You may
respond to jan.bares 'at' antek.cz.

Thanks, Jan

PS: I used VC 7.1 debugger and symbols from symbol server for the debugging
 
Jan,

That is some great debugging work. I talked with one of the Visual Studio
Debugger Developer's Andy Pennell. He did apologize that this does not
work reliably for you but as you can see there are some bugs in this
feature. He mentions another in his blog and that is the fact that this
does not work at all if you attach to a process instead of launching the
process via F5.

Here is his blog: http://weblogs.asp.net/andypennell/archive/2004/02/06.aspx

Again, I am sorry that this does not work reliably.

Thanks,
Zach Kramer
Microsoft C++/C# Support Professional
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties and confers no rights.
 
Thanks Zach,

Andy already posted me email (the bug was also present in Whidbey). You may
consider this problem closed.

Jan
 
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