I have a customer reporting a supposed resource leak in our product which used mixed code. So I wanted to debug into it to see what was really going on. I’ve been experiencing weirdness like Visual Studio crashing, freezing during stepping through code and the debugger just stopping at random points with bad exit codes.
I narrowed it down to the unmanaged function that’s causing it, it’s a function started from another thread vs the main one. I keep thinking I have the exact line of code that causes it but the location of the problem seems to keep changing. So I got to the general location of the problem and started stepping through the assembly code, line by line.
I even moved my breakpoint to where the function first begins and boom when the debugger reaches that point if I step past it, it will exit. If I set my breakpoint 20 lines into the function instead, the execution makes it to that point, then I step past it and the debugger exits so I don’t believe it really has anything to do with what my function is really doing within { }.
When I do this with F10 the debugger stops and the exit code is STATUS_WX86_BREAKPOINT, when I do this with F11 it stops with the exit code STATUS_WX86_SINGLE_STEP. The names of the error codes make sense to me based on the type of stepping but don’t really tell me what’s wrong. When I run it again I try moving by breakpoint in the disassembly up thinking I’ll see what happened prior, the exit just happens earlier so it’s quite annoying. I’ve never encountered anything like this before and can’t find much on what this error really means I’m doing wrong?
Sometimes instead of exiting with a bad code, Visual Studio simply locks up on me.
I tend to agree with the comment of @paddy it looks like the problem is from a different thread.
Did you set VS to stop at first chance exceptions?
In your case since it is unmanaged code I would set the debugger to stop at win32 exceptions and C++ exceptions (All of them).
In case you don’t know you can do that from the debug menu -> Exceptions…