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System Requirements

To use this book, you'll need the following:

Microsoft Windows 2000 SP3 or later, Microsoft Windows XP Professional, or Windows Server 2003
Microsoft Visual Studio .NET Professional 2003, Microsoft Visual Studio .NET Enterprise Developer 2003, or Microsoft Visual Studio .NET Enterprise Architect 2003

What Comes with This Book's Sample Files?

As I've already mentioned, there's 6.9 MB of just source files. Considering that the source files alone are bigger than some commercial projects, I'm more than willing to bet that you're getting more source code with this book than any other .NET or Windows book ever published. There are over 20 utilities or libraries and over 35 example programs that show individual constructs. By the way, these numbers don't account for all the unit tests for the various utilities or libraries! Most of the code for the utility programs has been battle- tested in so many commercial applications that I lost count at over 800. I'm honored that so many companies have found my code good enough to use in their products and hope you use it as well.

Robert Lyon, the fantastic technical editor for this book, put together DEBUGNET.CHM , which serves as the README about how to build and use the code in your projects as well as describes every binary built from the source code.

Also with the sample files are the following Microsoft-supplied tools:

Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) version 2.6
Debugging Tools for Windows version 6.1.0017.2

I developed and tested all the projects with Microsoft Visual Studio .NET Enterprise Edition 2003. As for operating systems, I tested against Windows 2000 Service Pack 3, Windows XP Professional Service Pack 1, and Windows Server 2003 RC2 (previously named Windows .NET Server 2003).

READ THIS! Windows 98/Me and ANSI Code

Because Microsoft Windows Me is outdated and there's only one of me, I dropped all support for any operating systems prior to Windows 2000. I was supporting only Windows 2000 and later, so I made the extra effort and converted all my code to UNICODE as well. I used the TCHAR.H macros and ensured that I left interfaces on libraries that supported ANSI characters . However, I didn't compile any of the code as ANSI/multibyte, so you might run into compilation problems or run-time bugs if you do.

READ THIS! The DBGHELP.DLL Symbol Engine

In several of the native code utilities, I use the DBGHELP.DLL symbol engine distributed with Debugging Tools for Windows version 6.1.0017.2. As DBGHELP.DLL is now finally redistributable, I've included it in the Release and Output directories in the source code tree. As always, you should find out whether a newer version of Debugging Tools for Windows is available by checking www.microsoft.com/ddk/debugging so that you can get a newer version of DBGHELP.DLL . For compilation, DBGHELP.LIB is included with Visual Studio .NET.

If you're going to use any of my native code utilities, you'll need to move the included DBGHELP.DLL (or a later version) into the same directory as the utility. The versions of DBGHELP.DLL that come with Windows 2000 and Windows XP are earlier than version 6.1.0017.2.

Feedback

I'm very interested in knowing what you think of this book. If you have questions—or your own debugging war stories—I'd love to hear them! The best place to post questions about this book or debugging in general is in the "Debugging and Tuning" forum at www.wintellect.com/forum . The beauty of the forum is that you can search through the questions that other readers have already had and keep track of possible corrections and updates.

If you do have a question that you don't feel comfortable posting in a public forum, you can send e-mail to john@wintellect.com . Please keep in mind that I travel quite a bit and get a lot of e-mail, so you might not get an immediate response. But I will do my best to answer your e-mail.

Thanks for reading, and happy debugging!

John Robbins
February 2003
Hollis, New Hampshire
Bob in 2020