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Visual Lint and Windows Driver Kit (WDK) projects

Products, the Universe and Everything from Products, the Universe and Everything

We have recently been working with Don Burn on PC-lint analysis of Windows Driver Kit (WDK) projects, and he has written an interesting article on the subject titled "Another Look at Lint" in the March-April 2013 issue of the NT Insider.

Within the article you will find the following rather complementary passage:

Finally the ultimate tool for using PC-lint with the WDK is Riverblade's Visual Lint. This is a third party tool providing an integrated package that works inside VS2012. The tool is an add-on to PC-lint which you must still purchase. The capabilities include background analysis of the project, coded display listings that - like Visual Studio - clicking on the error takes you to the line to edit and provides easy lookup of the description of the errors. The latest version of Visual Lint (4.0.2.198) is required for use with the WDK. The tool has a minor bug that if there are two subprojects with the same name, such as filter in the Toaster sample, one needs to be renamed for analysis to work. A fix is in the works.

To use Visual Lint with the WDK choose LintLdx.lnt as the standard lint configuration file for the tool. There is a 30-day free trial of Visual Lint available so if you are considering PC-lint, take a look at what Visual Lint can add to the experience. I expect to be using it for much of my work.

Our thanks to Don Burn for his patience while we worked through the issues raised by the analysis of WDK projects. As a postscript, a fix for the bug he refers to above has already been checked in and should become available in the next public Visual Lint build (most likely 4.0.3.200).

Posted on

Visual Lint and Windows Driver Kit (WDK) projects

Products, the Universe and Everything from Products, the Universe and Everything

We have recently been working with Don Burn on PC-lint analysis of Windows Driver Kit (WDK) projects, and he has written an interesting article on the subject titled "Another Look at Lint" in the March-April 2013 issue of the NT Insider.

Within the article you will find the following rather complementary passage:

Finally the ultimate tool for using PC-lint with the WDK is Riverblade's Visual Lint. This is a third party tool providing an integrated package that works inside VS2012. The tool is an add-on to PC-lint which you must still purchase. The capabilities include background analysis of the project, coded display listings that - like Visual Studio - clicking on the error takes you to the line to edit and provides easy lookup of the description of the errors. The latest version of Visual Lint (4.0.2.198) is required for use with the WDK. The tool has a minor bug that if there are two subprojects with the same name, such as filter in the Toaster sample, one needs to be renamed for analysis to work. A fix is in the works.

To use Visual Lint with the WDK choose LintLdx.lnt as the standard lint configuration file for the tool. There is a 30-day free trial of Visual Lint available so if you are considering PC-lint, take a look at what Visual Lint can add to the experience. I expect to be using it for much of my work.

Our thanks to Don Burn for his patience while we worked through the issues raised by the analysis of WDK projects. As a postscript, a fix for the bug he refers to above has already been checked in and should become available in the next public Visual Lint build (most likely 4.0.3.200).

Posted on

Visual Lint and Windows Driver Kit (WDK) projects

Products, the Universe and Everything from Products, the Universe and Everything

We have recently been working with Don Burn on PC-lint analysis of Windows Driver Kit (WDK) projects, and he has written an interesting article on the subject titled "Another Look at Lint" in the March-April 2013 issue of the NT Insider.

Within the article you will find the following rather complementary passage:

Finally the ultimate tool for using PC-lint with the WDK is Riverblade's Visual Lint. This is a third party tool providing an integrated package that works inside VS2012. The tool is an add-on to PC-lint which you must still purchase. The capabilities include background analysis of the project, coded display listings that - like Visual Studio - clicking on the error takes you to the line to edit and provides easy lookup of the description of the errors. The latest version of Visual Lint (4.0.2.198) is required for use with the WDK. The tool has a minor bug that if there are two subprojects with the same name, such as filter in the Toaster sample, one needs to be renamed for analysis to work. A fix is in the works.

To use Visual Lint with the WDK choose LintLdx.lnt as the standard lint configuration file for the tool. There is a 30-day free trial of Visual Lint available so if you are considering PC-lint, take a look at what Visual Lint can add to the experience. I expect to be using it for much of my work.

Our thanks to Don Burn for his patience while we worked through the issues raised by the analysis of WDK projects. As a postscript, a fix for the bug he refers to above has already been checked in and should become available in the next public Visual Lint build (most likely 4.0.3.200).

Posted on

Visual Lint and Windows Driver Kit (WDK) projects

Products, the Universe and Everything from Products, the Universe and Everything

We have recently been working with Don Burn on PC-lint analysis of Windows Driver Kit (WDK) projects, and he has written an interesting article on the subject titled "Another Look at Lint" in the March-April 2013 issue of the NT Insider. Within the article you will find the following rather complementary passage:
Finally the ultimate tool for using PC-lint with the WDK is Riverblade's Visual Lint. This is a third party tool providing an integrated package that works inside VS2012. The tool is an add-on to PC-lint which you must still purchase. The capabilities include background analysis of the project, coded display listings that - like Visual Studio - clicking on the error takes you to the line to edit and provides easy lookup of the description of the errors. The latest version of Visual Lint (4.0.2.198) is required for use with the WDK. The tool has a minor bug that if there are two subprojects with the same name, such as filter in the Toaster sample, one needs to be renamed for analysis to work. A fix is in the works. To use Visual Lint with the WDK choose LintLdx.lnt as the standard lint configuration file for the tool. There is a 30-day free trial of Visual Lint available so if you are considering PC-lint, take a look at what Visual Lint can add to the experience. I expect to be using it for much of my work.
Our thanks to Don Burn for his patience while we worked through the issues raised by the analysis of WDK projects. As a postscript, a fix for the bug he refers to above has already been checked in and should become available in the next public Visual Lint build (most likely 4.0.3.200).
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Of course I have to post something about Google Reader, too

The Lone C++ Coder's Blog from The Lone C++ Coder's Blog

The demise of Google reader viewed from a slightly different perspective. I find the analysis from someone who isn’t a proto-geek but rather an investment professional interesting, mainly because there are insights that some like me - who doesn’t spend the whole day looking at companies and trying to figure out what they are doing as opposed to what they say they are doing - would and this case, have missed.
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If you’re using boost::variant, you need to have a look at Boost 1.53

The Lone C++ Coder's Blog from The Lone C++ Coder's Blog

I was profiling some code a while ago that makes extensive use of boost::variant and one of the lessons from the profiler run was that boost variants appear to be fairly expensive to construct and copy. As of 1.53, variants support rvalue constructors and rvalue assignment operators. My initial measurements suggest that when used with types that are “move enabled”, there is a benefit in upgrading to this version of boost variant, both in performance and memory consumption.
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Improving the Emacs integration in Windows

The Lone C++ Coder's Blog from The Lone C++ Coder's Blog

I was trying to make Windows a little more Emacs-friendly (or was it the other way around?). First step was to enable the emacs server in my .emacs so I could make use of Emacs for quick and dirty editing tasks that require an editor better than Notepad but where the average Emacs startup time was just a little too long to make Emacs a viable alternative. A typical example would be to use Emacs as the editor for commit messages in Mercurial.
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The stuff you find when you’re moving home

The Lone C++ Coder's Blog from The Lone C++ Coder's Blog

Happy New Year to all readers. I’ve been blogging even less recently as we’ve just moved house but unpacking all the boxes meant that I came across one of my favourite magazines: German readers of this blog (if are there any) might recognise the magazine - it’s the first issue of “c’t”, a magazine that is still going on strong almost thirty years later. The issue above is dated November/December 1983 and has moved house (and continents) with me a fair number of times.
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Windows 8 Pro on an early 2009 iMac 21.5 (Core 2 Duo)

Pete Barber from C#, C++, Windows & other ramblings

A couple of weeks back I thought I'd have a go writing a Windows Store App.  To do this requires Windows 8.  At the time I was running Windows 7 Home Premium on an early 2009 iMac 21.5 (Core 2 Duo).  This had been installed using Boot Camp including install Boot Camp assistant and the drivers supplied by Apple.

To upgrade to Windows 8 I wanted to avoid a re-installation of all my apps. and data etc so I went with an in place upgrade.  This all seemed to work properly and soon I was running Windows 8 and could access the Windows Store App templates from Visual Studio.  However, soon after Windows 8 kept crashing, well freezing.  It got to the point that after every reboot I'd be lucky to get 5 minutes of up time between each freeze.

Given that Apple haven't provided Windows 8 drivers yet this wasn't exactly a surprise.  I decided to try and work around this by rebooting to OS X and using VMWare Fusion to access the Boot Camp partition.  Whilst rebooting in OS X I managed to corrupt the Windows installation.  I use a non-Apple wireless keyboard (as I need the insert, delete, home & end plus the easily accessible cursor keys for VS development) so holding down Alt to select the OS to boot into didn't work.  When I realized it was going back into Windows I just turned the machine off.  After a couple of times the Windows installation was toast!  To get back to the point of trying Fusion I had to do a fresh Windows install.  In this case installing a minimal Windows 7 installation: just enough to allow the download of Windows 8.  I then installed Windows 8 using the preserve nothing option.

Having now gone through the steps I wanted to avoid I decided to give the new installation a go via direct boot, i.e. no Fusion.  That was two weeks ago.  Since then I've re-installed all the apps. and my personal data and (fingers crossed) haven't had a single crash.  As the freezes were usually happening during some graphical operation e.g. a status bar updating I assumed the fault probably lay with the video drivers.  I didn't install Boot Camp assistant and in particular the Windows 7 drivers from OS X disc.  Well, I did install one.  After a while I noticed I wasn't getting any sound even though all the audio drivers and hardware claimed they were happy.  Eventually I installed by the Cirrus Logic driver which made the speakers work. I haven't gone anywhere near the NVIDIA drivers.

So, the whole point of this post is for those who run Windows via Boot Camp on early iMacs and want to run Windows 8 then perhaps a fresh install (or maybe uninstall the Boot Camp supplied drivers prior to upgrade) is probably the way to go.
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How to make a self-signed SSL certificate work with Windows RT’s Mail App on a Microsoft Surface RT

The Lone C++ Coder's Blog from The Lone C++ Coder's Blog

Long title, I know… I was trying to get Windows RT’s Mail App to access the email on my own server. The server uses IMAPS with s self-signed certificate as I only want SSL for it encryption and don’t really need it for authentication purposes as well. As long as it is the correct self-signed certificate I’m happy. The Mail app however rejects certificates that weren’t signed by a trusted authority and doesn’t offer an obvious exception mechanism (like Thunderbird or Apple Mail) that circumvents the need for a trusted certificate.