Melbourne/National Meeting 15th August 2022 - Debugging - Malcolm Groves - Must Zoom

Malcolm will be presenting his postponed 2022 Symposium talk on Debugging, on Monday, 15th August at 7:00 pm Melbourne time.

This is the first National Meeting, hosted in conjunction with Melbourne branch on their regular meeting night.

“Keep Calm and Use The Debugger”

A brief description …

It’s very possible that the necessary tool to help you solve the problem faster, and with less swearing, is right there in the IDE already. The Delphi and C++Builder Debuggers have a wide range of features, and in many cases people either aren’t aware of them, or don’t know quite when to use them.

So that’s what we’re going to focus on in this session. We’re going to dive deep into Debugger features and options that maybe you haven’t used, and see how to practically use them to identify and solve problems in your code.

No 3rd party products needed, only things shipped in the box. Also, I’m going to assume you already know how to use a basic Breakpoint, Step Into/Step Over, a basic Watch and that you already know how to swear. So I won’t be teaching those things in the session.

A full description …

Look in the forum in the Meetings category, “Symposium 2022 - Malcolm Groves on Debugging”.

Mark this event in your diary … a symposium presentation for free!

The meeting opens at 6:00 for 6:15 with the regular news and questions starting the night.

Malcolm’s presentation starts at 7:00 pm, allowing attendees a little more time to get home from work and settled. Be prepared for a good 90 minutes of entertaining and practical learning.

In the time between regular news and questions, and Malcolm’s talk, we will be having a general discussion on different tools we use debugging when the IDE is not appropriate. All input welcome.

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Melbourne August 2022 ADUG Meeting

This meeting is on Monday 15th August
This meeting will be Zoom only.

When: 6:00 pm for a 6:15pm start.
Where: Zoom.

There will be a short question and answer/Soapbox session.

Following this, in preparation for Malcolm’s Talk there will be a short
discussion of tools that people use while debugging.

Malcolm will be presenting his postponed 2022 Symposium talk on
Debugging at 7:00 pm Melbourne time.

This is the first National Meeting, hosted in conjunction with Melbourne
branch on our regular meeting night.

Zoom link will be up here shortly before the meeting starts.

Reminder, tonight’s meeting is ZOOM only.

Thanks for the reminder Roger. Unfortunately I can’t make it tonight. Will this meeting be available for viewing later ?

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Likely I think, but possibly restricted to Symposium registrants.

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Is there a link to the meeting. I can’t find one

Thanks Paul

858 4848 2131
pwd 184939

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meeting host has ignored me for 20 minutes

Lance

Meeting host has been trying to let you in …

I’m sure I saw you on a while back, but you are not there now

Arent you a tad early ?

Hi Sue

Is there a url.

I keep getting timed out

Graeme

Did you get the email?

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Thanks to Malcolm, for years I have been silently cursing for not being able to break for data access. Not realizing it was there all along.

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I came in at the tail end of the discussion on Peganza’s tools. I would like to give it a plug. I have been using the paid up version “Analyzer” for a long long time. I typically spend a day a month looking through it’s reports. And there are a lot of reports, but you can turn them off.

After so many years, I have no Errors, a few warnings and many hints.

There are more false positives than real issues, by a ratio of 10 to 1. However, I have never been disappointed. Every time I find a good 3 to 4 bugs. If I hadn’t found them, then the clients would have. So, it is always time well spent. For the false positives, my goal is to remove them so that next time I can find the real ones faster. You can disable that sub-report, re-organize the code or flag it with PALOFF comment.

Most (NOT all) of these bugs are in my employees code and most are function result not set. Next on the list is Variable not initialized. Peganza is really good at looking at various paths through the function/procedure.

In preparation for multi–lingual support, I have been using Peganza to track magic strings in the code and convert them to resourcestrings. ModelMaker has a nice view of this too. I had gone from 13K+ of such strings down to 4K strings, before I sold the Company.

Also, Christer is very receptive to fixing bugs (false positives) and implementing suggestions.

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I can’t praise him enough. I have been running PAL across work’s code base and it has been erroring for a number of reasons (or in the main case, just disappearing with a stack overflow). He has been so helpful it trying to figure it out (as well as taking on suggestions!!).

Is there a recording of Malcolm’s presentation available?

@greaham thanks for reminding me. I’ve just got to make sure my edit of the session is ok and I will upload it on Monday.

You can see the recording here https://forums.adug.org.au/t/malcolm-groves-on-keep-calm-and-use-the-debugger/59596

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