Now that Windows 7 is out, we all sooner or later have to upgrade to WDK 7600. I am still reluctant to move away from WDK 6000⁄6001 because of the dropped W2K support, but this is a different issue.
However, as one cfix user who has obviously already adopted WDK 7600 kindly pointed out to me, linking a kernel mode unit test against cfix using WDK 7600 and the WIN7/amd64 environment fails reproducibly with the following error message:
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Having given my presentation on NTrace today at the WCRE in Lille/France, I have also opened ntrace.org to the public. NTrace, in case you have missed my previous posts, is a dynamic function boundary tracing system for Windows/x86 I initially developed as part of my Master’s thesis that is capable of performing DTrace-like tracing of both user and kernel mode components.
On the NTrace page, you will now find the paper itself as being published as part of the WCRE proceedings (mind the copyright notice, please) along with two screencasts: One showing how NTrace can be used to trace kernel mode components such as NTFS, and one demonstrating NTrace for user mode tracing.
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Definetely one my pet peeves about Windows Installer is how it deals with instruction set architectures (ISAs). Looking at Windows NT history, supported ISAs have come (amd64, IA-64) and gone (Alpha, PowerPC, MIPS) – yet most of the time, there was more than one ISA being officially supported. Having to ship binaries for multiple ISAs therefore always has been on the agenda for many ISVs.
Needless to say, supporting multiple ISAs requires special consideration when developing setup packages and providing separate packages – one for each ISA – has become common practice to approach this.
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Next week, the 16th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE) will be held in Lille, France. I will be there presenting NTrace: Function Boundary Tracing for Windows on IA-32.
NTrace is a dynamic function boundary tracing toolkit for IA-32/x86 that can be used to trace both kernel and user mode Windows components – examples for components that can be traced include the kernel itself (ntoskrnl), drivers like NTFS as well as user mode components such as kernel32, shell32 or even explorer.
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The Beta 2 release of Visual Assert (formerly named cfix studio) is now available for download. The release marks a major step in the development of Visual Assert for that it not only comprises a number of bugfixes but also introduces major new features. The two most important certainly are support for EXE targets and Wizard assistance.
Support for EXE Targets As announced in a previous post and also discussed in the post about the cfix 1.
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A new version of the cfix unit testing framework is now ready for download.
Unlike the previous release, which was mainly a maintenance release, cfix 1.5 adds major new features: kernel mode multithreading and EXE-based unit tests.
EXE based unit tests As I discussed in a previous post in the context of Visual Assert/cfix studio, cfix’ restriction to DLL based unit tests has turned out to be quite a limitation for certain kinds of projects.
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Back when I began thinking about creating a Visual Studio Add-In for cfix, I needed a code name for the project. After tentatively using the name cfix+ for a while, I quickly settled on cfix studio – given that the project revolved around cfix and Visual Studio, this name pretty much suggested itself.
Soon after going into Beta, however, I had to realize that this name was not without its problems.
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Whenever Windows Installer’s built-in actions do not suffice to perform a specific task, a Custom Action needs to be written. Needless to say, Custom Actions, can be a bit tricky – not only can they be laborious to write and cumbersome to debug, they also run the risk of interfering with Windows Installer’s declarative, transactional way of performing installs.
It is not really surprising that Windows Installer therefore more or less discourages the use of Custom Actions unless it is absolutely necessary.
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Back in 2008, the Windows Server Performance Team Blog, which I came across recently, ran a series of posts on Designing Applications for High Performance:
Designing Applications for High Performance - Part I Designing Applications for High Performance - Part II Designing Applications for High Performance - Part III If you are interested in developing server side applications for Windows, these articles are definitely worth reading.
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The Automated Testing Institute has elected cfix to be one of the finalists for the Autmation Honors award. The winners of the award will be highlighted in a Special December Edition of the Automated Software Testing Magazine.
If you are a cfix user, be sure to vote for cfix here.
And by the way, I think The Grinder, which is a really neat web performance testing framework, also deserves being voted for…
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N.B. cfix studio was the code name of what has become Visual Assert
The biggest shortcoming of the current cfix studio version certainly is that it requires all tests be implemented in a DLL. Conceptually, keeping test cases separated from the remaining code certainly is a good idea – and implementing tests in a DLL is a way to accomplish this. However, there are many projects in which such separation is either not feasible or just too much effort.
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Although Windows Explorer may actually not be the brightest spot of Windows, it is still, for most users, among the most often used pograms. Customizing it to speed up certain tasks is thus a natural desire.
A while ago, I wrote about how to extend the context menu by new commands that allow MSI packages to be installed/uninstalled with logfiles being created. The registry entries I used were:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.
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N.B. cfix studio was the code name of what has become Visual Assert
There is little doubt that native code, and C and C++ in particular, is here to stay. And still, it is pretty obvious that when it comes to tools and IDEs, it is the managed world that has gotten most attention from tool vendors over the past years.
While there are lots and lots of useful tools for native development, many of them probably even better than their managed counterparts, there are some areas where the managed language fraction is far ahead: One of these areas certainly is IDE support for unit testing.
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Today, a new version of cfix, the open source unit testing framework for user and kernel mode C and C++, has been released. cfix 1.4, in addition to the existing feature of allowing test runs to be restricted to specific fixtures, now also allows single testcases to be run in isolation, which can be a great aid in debugging. Besides several minor fixes, the cfix API has been slightly enhanced and cfix now degrades more gracefully in case of dbghelp-issues.
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Almost two years ago, I wrote about how to create multi-language MSI packages. Although using transforms to internationalize an MSI package is a viable solution, one drawback of this approach is that it may require a bootstrap loader.
While it is easy to say that a bootstrap loader is required and many high-profile setups do indeed use bootstrap loaders, bootstrap loaders do have their issues. They not only add complexity to the setup package, there actually are several reasons why a bootstrap loader-free setup may be preferrable.
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It is common practice to embed a version resource (VS_VERSIONINFO) into PE images such as DLL and EXE files. While this resource mainly serves informational purposes, the version information is occasionaly used to perform certain checks, such as verifying the module’s suitability for a particular purpose.
Under certain circumstances, however, this versioning information may be too imprecise: Versions are not necessarily incremented after each build, so it is possible that two copies of a module carry the same versioning information, yet differ significantly in their implementation.
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Avoiding COM object leaks in managed applications that make use of COM Interop can be a daunting task. While diligent tracking of COM object references and appropriate usage of Marshal.ReleaseComObject usually works fine, COM Interop is always good for surprises.
Recently having been tracking down a COM object leak in a COM/.Net-Interop-centric application, I noticed that the CLR did not quite manage the reference count on my COM object as I expected it to do – more precisely, it incremented the referece count of a COM object when it was passed (from COM) as a method parameter to a callback implemented in .
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cfix 1.3, the latest version of the unit testing framework for C/C++ on Windows, has just been released. As announced in the last blog post, the major new feature of this release is WinUnit compatibility, i.e. the ability to recompile existing WinUnit test suites into cfix test suites without having to change a single line of code.
To demonstrate that this compatibility indeed works, consider the following simple example:
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Around two years ago, in early 2007, after having read about, having tried, and finally having dismissed numerous existing unit testing frameworks for C, I resigned and started thinking about creating a new unit testing framework. Having been accustomed to NUnit and JUnit, I found most frameworks clumsy to use – some “frameworks” like MinUnit are a joke, some frameworks like CUnit require lots of boilerplate code to be written, some frameworks only support C++ but not C, and some manage to combine the worst properties of them all (CppUnit).
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Browsing through ACM Queue’s archives I came across the article Real-World Concurrency by Bryan Cantrill (who, by the way, is the inventor of DTrace) and Jeff Bonwick (Issue 5⁄2008). The article provides a nice summary of actual challenges and best practices for systems programming in a multithreaded/shared memory environment. Worth reading.
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LTCG issues with the WIN7/amd64 environment of WDK 7600
