RichEdit controls hangs in CTxtEdit::TxSendMessage - winapi

In my app I use a RichEdit control (RICHED20.DLL) with syntax highlighting implemented on top of it. Quite a lot of code was necessary to make this work correctly. Internally, everything is stored as RTF and reformatted on the fly. This code has been working stable for over 10 years now in lots of different environments.
However, recently one user has managed to make my app freeze. He even managed to come up with a description of steps that can be used to clearly reproduce the freeze. Thus, I was able to debug it with WinDbg and got the report that it hangs in CTxtEdit::TxSendMessage. This is what WinDbg says when I break the program as soon as it hangs and do a !analyze -hang in WinDbg:
Probably caused by : RICHED20.DLL (
riched20!CTxtEdit::TxSendMessage+132e )
So does this look like a bug in the RichEdit control? Is there anything else I could debug here? I don't really know where to look because the hang is apparently not in my app. I've already checked and made sure that neither the WndProc of my RichEdit control nor the WndProc of the top-level receive any messages during the hang. It really seems to hang in RICHED20.DLL so to me it looks like a RichEdit control bug.
Could that be the case or what else could I try to debug the issue further? I'm out of ideas here.

Related

GAS Debugger immediately closes itself upon error; some questions about debugging

I have a script that I'm trying to debug, but the debugger immediately closes itself when it hits an error and dismisses the error message. I could manually open the log and wait for it to load every time I hit a stop, but that wastes a lot of time when it could just pop up on my screen. I figure it has to be an easy fix and I probably did something stupid, but one gets pretty tired of Google's shit when you've read blog headlines such as "THE 6 DEADLY SINS OF GOOGLE APPS SCRIPT ADD-ON DEVELOPMENT" for the 50th time in as many search queries. Anyways, rant over.
When I hit debug, the debugger will run, a white tray pops up at the bottom of my screen and stays empty. When it hits an error, it will flash the error message across the top of the window and immediately close/dismiss that error as well the tray that popped up. The tray looks like the one in the image below, except completely empty.
Has anyone else had this issue and know why it might be happening? Also, can anyone tell me if there is a Matlab-style workspace explorer that displays each user-defined variable and what kind of data it holds? I would find that extremely helpful in debugging. That, and a live in-window console/log.
This is a known issue. Star(on the top left) the issue to let Google know that you're affected and for the issue to be prioritised. Some of the features you requested is already in development
New IDE features Monaco for cutting edge code editing, streaming logs, reliable debugging and Material design. Seamless integration into the G Suite Developer Hub lets users design, develop, deploy and manage their projects all in one place.
In the meantime, You can use clasp in your local IDE.
Related question:
V8 engine no longer breaks on errors

Visual studio extreme lag spikes while debugging

When Im debugging my app in VS2012 and it crashes, the input (mouse and keyboard) starts to lag extremely, the fps drops to about 0.3 or less and I can't even move my mouse without waiting 3 seconds... The only solution is to do Shift-F5 which will end the debugging, and everythng is fine then again.
Whats more interesting, the only lagging thing is the input, the whole background works perfectly fine, text caret is blinking at normal rate and tooltips are nicely animated when mouse gets over a button.
Im compiling the project with allegro 4.2 (I have to use it, it would take too long to explain why).
I have no extensions, a pretty fast pc which should be able to handle debugging...
Im interested in any solution, it may be dirty/hackish... I can of course provide more information if needed.
Thanks for any help.
EDIT: Reading through forums I found some information about the "Auto" window or something like that (don't remember exactly and can't find it anymore), which is doing some "background tasks" and that causes lags... Do you think running it on separate core would fix that?
A tale of multi-second stalls when hitting a breakpoint, related to the raw input API: http://the-witness.net/news/2012/12/finding-and-fixing-a-five-second-stall/ (archived)
It's a very long time since I last saw this sort of thing myself, but I seem to remember that the culprit in my case was DirectInput. (This makes some sense, given the tale above, as DirectInput has long been a wrapper over the raw input API.) And I think the solution was to use the emulated keyboard and mouse devices rather than the default ones, which you do this by passing in one of the emulated device GUIDs to IDirectInput8_CreateDevice. Discussed briefly here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ee416845%28v=vs.85%29.aspx
(I don't remember whether cooperative and exclusivity levels made a difference - it might be worth trying changing these too.)
I recently experienced the following similar issues while debugging a game:
Hit a breakpoint, halting the program for debugging.
Pressing any key now takes around 1 second to "process". It will be buffered and sent slowly one after another to whatever window is now active.
In my case, the application installed a low level keyboard hook with SetWindowsHookEx(WH_KEYBOARD_LL, ...). After removing this (for !NDEBUG builds only as you wish), the input lag was gone.
I suppose the hook cannot respond at all while your application is halted, and eventually the system skips it after a timeout, which length can be configured in milliseconds under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\LowLevelHooksTimeout:DWORD as mentioned here. In fact, the link in the accepted answer mentions this issue, but I thought I explain the core of it right here, also because the link went dead before I fixed it.
Try to find such a hook in your application or dependencies, and check if removing it helps. Since you mentioned this happens to your mouse too, check for a (low level) mouse hook (WH_MOUSE_LL) aswell. The available hooks are listed on MSDN.

How to disable the Help key and context sensitive help mode in OSX, especially with Qt

I have a cross platform Qt application that's running into some trouble in OSX. There's a feature that OSX has that I didn't even know existed - the 'Help' key. My MBP doesn't have one, and neither does my Apple wired keyboard purchased a year ago. It seems that this is mostly something that older Macs have. Apparently it generates the same scan code as the Insert key on PC keyboards.
Anyways, when the Help key is pressed, the cursor over our application (or any application that receives the Help key event) turns into a little question mark. This seems to be part of what's called 'context-sensitive help mode', as documented in the NSHelpManager's setContextHelpModeActive: method and in the NSApplication's activateContextHelpMode: method docs. From the docs:
In this mode, the cursor becomes a question mark, and help appears for any user interface item the user clicks.
Most applications don’t use this method. Instead, applications enter
context-sensitive mode when the user presses the Help key.
Applications exit context-sensitive help mode upon the first event
after a help window is displayed.
How many Cocoa developers actually know about this? I'm assuming that clicking on something in the application with this question mark cursor should do something like bring up a help message, but I haven't found a single Cocoa application where it actually does anything at all - not even Apple's apps do anything. In fact, it even seems to put a lot of applications into a strange mode where the cursor text selection is enabled.
The problem is that when we change the application cursor programmatically in Qt when we're in this help-question-cursor-mode, bad things happen. Specifically, our application actually crashes. The crash happens deep inside Cocoa in the NSApplication's NSHelpManager. I'd like to find out why we're seeing this crash, but I'm actually more interested in how we can suppress this 'help' mode. There's nothing in Qt or Cocoa that I can see that would stop it, other than perhaps intercepting and squashing an event, which I haven't tried yet.
Does anyone know any more about this?

How does Spy++ construct its process list?

TL;DR - How does the Spy++ tool really construct its process list?
Stage
We have an MFC desktop application (running on Windows XP) that is hanging in that it doesn't react to any user input anymore. It is redrawn when switching to it via alt-tab however. (It does receive WM_SETFOCUS, WM_ACTIVATE, etc. It apparently does not receive any mouse or keyboard messages.)
Since the app is hanging in some limbo, we pulled a few process dumps, but these were of little help so far. Enter:
Spy++
We used Spy++ to find the information I gave above about the window messages this application seems to be processing. We did this by Opening the Windows View and selecting our application Window and in the Messages properties selected Windows of same process and Messages to View : Select All.
However we first tried to view all messages of this process by opening the Processes View of Spy++ and our application is not shown in this process list. Cross checking on another PC where the app is running normally, the process is also normally shown in the processes list of Spy++.
Can anything about the misbehaving app be inferred from the fact that the process is not shown in Spy++'s Process View, but the main window of the app is shown in the Windows View. Why would a process with a main window that is visible not be shown in Spy++'s Processes View?
The process is listed in Task Manager and in the Attach Process Window of Visual Studio 2005. So these tools apparently use a different method to list processes than Spy++ ... ?
The system where the app is currently hanging is a Windows XP SP2 system and we've used the Spy++ Utility that comes with Visual Studio 2005.
The behavior does recur occasionally, but only after the App has been running for several days!
Running Vista or later? Your process is probably elevated and Spy++ is not. Newer versions of Spy++ require elevation. So, try elevating Spy++ explicitly and see if that helps.
Yes, of course things can be inferred from this. Don't take anything I say too seriously in this context, I'd have to go look at the code. But I believe that Spy goes off and looks at the EnumProcesses API. (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms682629.aspx)
So, if your process isn't showing up there... hrm.
But, what is different between the system where it's working and the one where it's not?
Spy++ requires the following two values in the registry to be disabled (0) to display the processes/threads list AT ALL:
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Perflib
HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\PerfProc\Performance
Disable Performance Counters -> either 0 or not present
Was going insane trying to find out why it refused to display them. It's some kind of bad joke - this debugger requires itself a debugger to get it working! Not that WinDBG would display any meaningful info, MS doesn't even provide a symbol file on their symbol server, pfft.
Anyway, maybe it doesn't display processes that have their performance counters disabled, because I think, this can be set on individual basis, at least for services, like:
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\.NET CLR Networking\Performance
Disable Performance Counters
So it's basically always a value of the "Performance" subkey. All this stuff is undocumented, it makes use of advapi32.dll functions like "PerfRegQueryValue" and "PerfRegQueryInfoKey"... don't ask me.

How can I stop losing all my IDE window position when pressing the start debugging button?

I use Visual Studio 2008. I haven't seen this behavior before and, as far as I know, I didn't change anything in the options.
When I press Start debugging all the possibly windows (watch 1 - 4), data sources, properties, registers (to be honest I have not even ever seen these windows before) appear in front of the code window and stay there after I stop the debugger.
Anyone has an idea what could be causing this ? (I am using CodeRush and Refactor for quite a while now)
When I close and restart visual studio all the windows are where they should be.
PS: Previously I have seen normal switching from normal to debug mode and back with some repositioning changes. That is the way it used to work. Now it is not. It has suddenly gone mad and when going to the debug mode it sometimes shows all possible IDE windows and sometimes not. When it does it no longer returns to the previous state. I cannot find this in the options anywhere.
Visual Studio remembers 2 sets of window layouts, normal mode and debugging mode. My solution is to arrange my normal windows exactly like I want them, then start debugging an application and once again arrange all of the windows the way I want, usually making it as similar to my normal layout as possible, then stopping the debugger and doing a File Exit so that VS saves my settings.
After doing that, it recalls my 2 different layouts each time.
I'm experiencing the same thing - whenever the debugger is running, switching focus back to the IDE immediately caused the debug panel to expand.
I ended up just pinning the debug panel so that it always appears when debugging, and just changing its height as needed.
To add to palehorse, another tip is Full Screen mode.

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