I couldn't find a solution to this problem. I have a very simple program to generate a PDF using JAGPDF. If i am opening the program from visual studio (same input, same parameters) it runs to the end without errors 90% of the time, but sometimes it throws an exception telling me that symbols not loaded for jagpdf-1.4.dll
If I run the executable directly, 90% it creates the PDF correctly and 10% of the time created a corrupted pdf that I cannot open. How can I solve this problem?
EDIT: I put a screenshot of the error I'm getting, it is very dificult to reproduce because the program runs normally about 90% of the time, so I have to press build several times until it crashes...
EDIT 2: Since it seems the bug is from the library, (I already send them a message reporting it but doubt they'll do something about it because last release was years ago).
I sort of solved the problem by wrapping the function around a loop using try and catch where if the first time it fails then the exception is caught and the function is tried again until it passes. I put a limit of 10 times it can run the loop before terminating it.
The thinking was that, as the events seem to be statistically independent, the loop will reduce the chance of it failing from 0.1 to 0.1^n with n the number of loops.
So now the program is crashing with a probability of 0.0000001% instead of 10%.
With this fix I am happy to report no fails for this weeks data.
Thank you all for pointing me to the direction of the error.
It sounds as if you have found a bug in the PDF library you are using. You have to file a bug report with the PDF software provider. Hopefully they can provide you support.
I've experienced this with every version of Visual Studio starting from 2012 (2012, 2013, 2015 Preview), on multiple computers and multiple projects, but I haven't figured out how to fix it:
Whenever I'm debugging a 64-bit(?) C++ console program, after a few minutes and seemingly completely randomly (when I'm not clicking or typing anything), the console window for the program spontaneously closes and I can no longer debug or step through the program with Visual Studio. When I press Stop and attempt to restart debugging, I usually get ERROR_NETWORK_UNREACHABLE:
// MessageId: ERROR_NETWORK_UNREACHABLE
// MessageText:
// The network location cannot be reached. For information about network troubleshooting, see Windows Help.
#define ERROR_NETWORK_UNREACHABLE 1231L
If I try to attach to the process manually I get the error:
Unable to attach to the process.
The only fix I've found for this is to restart Visual Studio. I can't find any other way to fix it, and I've tried running Process Monitor but haven't found anything.
What causes this problem and how can I fix it?
(?) Upon further checking it seems that this only happens in 64-bit mode, but I'm not 100% sure.
Ok, this is just so wrong
I also have issues with this bug, and in my case it occurred every other debug session. Which meant debug -> stop -> debug -> bug -> restart visual studio -> go to start (repeat every minute during the whole day).
Needless to say I was driven to find a solution. So yesterday I tried procmon, spend hours looking at API monitor differences, looked at plugins, netstat, etc, etc, etc. And found nothing. I gave up.
Today
Until today.
To track down a stupid bug in my program today, I launched appverifier. For my application, I ran the 'basics' tests and clicked save. After a few hours this led me to the bug in my program, which was something like this (extremely simplified version):
void* dst = _aligned_malloc(4096, 32);
memcpy(dst, src, 8192);
Obviously this is a bug and obviously it needed fixing. I noticed the error after putting a breakpoint on the memcpy line, which was not executed.
After a stop and 'debug' again I was surprised to find that I could actually debug the program for the second time. And now, several hours later, this annoying bug here hasn't re-emerged.
So what appears to be going on
So... apparently data from my program is bleeding through into the data or execution space of the debugger, which in turn appears to generate the bug.
I see you thinking: No, this shouldn't happen... you're right; but apparently it does.
So how to fix it? Basically fixing your program (more particular: heap corruption issues) seems to make the VS debugger bug go away. Using appverifier.exe (It's in Debugging tools for Windows) will give you a head start.
Why this works
Since VS2012, VC++ uses a different way to manage the heap. Hans Passant explains it here: Does msvcrt uses a different heap for allocations since (vs2012/2010/2013) .
What basically happens is that heap corruption will break your debugger. The AppVerifier basic settings will ensure that a breakpoint is triggered just before the application does something to corrupt the heap.
So, what happens now is that before the process will break the heap, a breakpoint will trigger instead, which usually means you will terminate the process. The net effect is that the heap will still be in-tact before you terminate your program, which means that your debugger will still function.
"Test"
Before using appverifier -- bug triggered every 2 minutes
While using appverifier -- VS debugger has been stable for 5 days (and counting)
This is an environmental problem of course. Always hard to troubleshoot, SysInternals' utilities like Process Monitor and Process Explorer are your primary weapons of choice. Some non-intuitive ways that a network error can be generated while debugging:
Starting with VS2012, the C runtime library had a pretty drastic modification that can cause very hard to diagnose mis-behavior if your program corrupts the heap. Much like #atlaste describes. Since time memorial, the CRT always created its own heap, underlying call was HeapCreate(). No more, it now uses GetProcessHeap(). This is very convenient, much easier now to deal with DLLs that were built with /MT. But with a pretty sharp edge, you can now easily corrupt the memory owned by Microsoft code. Not strongly indicated if you can't reattach a 64-bit program, you'd have to kill msvsmon.exe to clear up the corruption.
The Microsoft Symbol Server supplies PDBs for Microsoft executables. They normally have their source+line-number info stripped, but not all of them. Notably not for the CRT for example. Those PDBs were built on a build server owned by DevDiv in Redmond that had the source code on the F: drive. A few around that were built from the E: drive, Patterns+Practices uses that (unlikely in a C++ program). Your debugger will go look there to try to find source code. That usually ends well, it gives up quickly, but not if your machine uses those drive letters as well. Diagnose by clearing the symbol cache and disabling the symbol server with Tools + Options, Debugging, Symbols.
The winapi suffers from two nasty viral infections it inherited from another OS that add global state to any process. The PATH environmental variable and the default working directory. Use Control Panel + System + Advanced + Environment to have a look at PATH, copy/paste the content of the intentionally small textboxes into a text editor. Make sure it is squeaky clean, some paralysis at the usual mess is normal btw. Take no prisoners. Having trouble with the default directory is much harder to troubleshoot. Both should pop out when you use Process Monitor.
No slamdunk explanations, it is a tough problem, but dark corners you can look in.
I have the same problem. Thought it was related to 64 bit console apps, where it is very easily triggered with almost any debug session. But, it also happens on 64 bit windows apps too. Now I am seeing it on 32 bit windows apps. I am running Windows 8.1 pro on a single desktop with the latest version of vs 2013 and no remote debugging. My (added) extensions are Visual Assist, Advanced Installer, ClangFormat, Code Alignment, Code Compare, Duplicate Selection, Productivity Power Tools 2013, and Visual SVN.
I discovered that the "Visual Studio 2013\Settings\CurrentSettings.vssettings" file gets corrupted. You can delete this file and recreate it by restarting VS or you can try to edit the XML. I then keep a copy of a good settings file that I use to replace when it gets corrupted again.
In my case, the corrupted line begins with
</ToolsOptionsSubCategory><ToolsOptionsSubCategory name="XAML" RegisteredName="XAML"
... and it is extremely long (I think this is why it is prone to corruption).
I just disabled in the Menu
Tools > Options
Debugging > Edit and Continue
Native-only options > Enable native Edit and Continue
and now it does not give the that stupid error which was preventing the starting of the debuggee application.
I also had the same problem with VS2015. It was so frustrating that a simple Hello World program gave this error when I ran debugger for the second time. Tried uninstall and reinstall and didn't work.
Finally, the solution mentioned in https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/vstudio/en-US/8dce0952-234f-4c18-a71a-1d614b44f256/visual-studios-2012-cannot-findlaunch-project-exe?forum=vsdebug
worked. Reset all visual studio settings using Tools->Import and Export settings. Now the issue is not occurring.
Question: Can I set up VS2010 so it automatically writes debug output to a file?
Motivation: I have a DirectX 9 application that I'm trying to debug. I've noticed that when my application is fullscreen, it may crash under certain conditions. Normally I would just check my logs or DirectX debug output. However, the way my program crashes prevents that. It freezes and does not respond to any my attempts to end it (including "End Process" from task manager). Moreover, it also freezes my VS2010, and so VS doesn't respond to any commands either. The only way out of this whole thing that I've found is to End VS process. This, however, also destroys the output I'd very much like to read.
Now I see two ways out of this. First is to write all the debug info to a file but I have no idea how to do it. Second is to make my application crash in a more friendly way, but this seems like a difficult task.
Probably MiniDumpWriteMiniDump(..) helps on this. You can at any time dump the current state of the process to a file. After that, you can open the dumps with Visual Studio and analyze the state of the process - this includes callstacks of every thread, variable values...
Try to identify conditions in which your process crashes and write one or more dumps.
Another try is to install the Windows Debugging Tools and use WinDbg to debug your application. This is not as comfortable as Visual Studio, but allows a deeper insight.
Edit:
If there are debug statements made with OutputDebugString(..), you can use DebugView (from Microsoft, earlier Sysinternals) to display it.
I'm working on debugging a game written in C++ and it recently started hanging on the splash screen when I try to run it in Xcode (in Debug mode). I can't identify any changes in my code that could have caused this, and there aren't any log messages being printed while this hang is happening (something that I know can severely slow down a program). I then opened Instruments and used the time profiler to try and find the source of the problem, but when I ran my program on the time profiler it progressed past the part where it hangs, and ran as expected. Both running and profiling are set to use Debug mode so the build is the same, does anyone know what could possibly cause an issue like this?
More info: I'm using LLVM/Clang as the compiler and LLDB as the debugger. Looking at Activity Monitor during the hang I can see the game is shown as 'not responding' and Xcode is using a lot of CPU activity, despite not printing any log messages etc.. In 'Edit Schemes' the Profile scheme is set to use the Run action's arguments and environment variables.
When the compiling of a project is complete (or at least when it says it does), I receive no window, no error message, or anything; VC++ freezes up and my computer basically stops responding altogether.
After about five minutes, Task Manager finally pops up and I'm able to close the program. Upon doing that, I see this:
I'm going to take a wild guess here and say something is wrong with the image above. On a side note, the process' (MSBuild.exe) don't (seem) to open all at once, but that may only seem that way because the computer becomes frozen multiple times until I shutdown vc++.
Is this a known issue and if so what should I do so I can compile programs without this issue once again?
Additional Information:
Windows 7
Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 xpress
Project Type(s): I've tried on "Windows Form Application" project and "Win32 Project", both produce the same results.
Compiling projects in VB works as it should. (in case this helps at all)
As suggested by Hans Passant, disabling avast! solved the problem.
Did any error pop up during installation?
The standard thing to do (that almost always helps) is rebooting, reinstalling, (rebooting,) and trying again. Chances are absolutely nobody knows what's going wrong (even MS).