Chapter 7: Advanced Native Code Techniques with Visual Studio .NET

Overview

Although managed development does a great job of protecting you from all sorts of potential problems, native code development gives you every opportunity not only to shoot yourself in the foot, but also to wound the person in the next cubicle over. Doing native development is more work, but on the positive side, you get the ultimate in control and speed. Additionally, even though some marketing folks might make it sound like you need to drop everything and shift to .NET, such an immediate changeover isn't going to happen any time soon.

In this chapter, I'll cover the advanced techniques Microsoft Visual Studio .NET gives you for debugging your native applications. I'll start with discussing breakpoints, because with native code, you have even more options for stopping a process. We'll move on to more details about the Watch window as well as remote debugging. Finally, I'll cover Intel IA32 (Pentium) assembly language so that you can always figure out what happened, even when you have no source code around and are left in the bowels of third-party or operating system code.