Weird crash problem

The new Watchdog – O – Matic version has been released for a while now. I noticed I had a strange crash problem in the new version when closing the program. It only happened on Vista 64 bit. No problems on XP 32 and 64 bit, and no problems on Vista 32 bit.

So I fired up ye olde debugger to locate the problem. The crash seemed very erratic. It crashed at a certain point for no obvious reason, and when I disabled that code, it crashed somewhere else. The Microsoft debugger couldn't help me find the problem. Then I stumbled on an innocent looking line of code at the beginning of the program:

m_pszRegistryKey = "SOFTWARE\\Kwakkelflap\\Watchdog";

This is a string that's part of the CWinApp class that you have to initialize in your application if you want to read something from the registry. It seems that in Vista x64 there is a problem freeing the memory allocated by CWinApp when you close the program causing the crash. So I simply disabled this and everything works like a charm.

Things like this prove once more that a program like Watchdog – O – Matic is very useful for everyone. I bet there are a lot of crashes and unexpected system behavior out there caused by the shift to Vista (and 64 bit operating systems).

µISV survey

Neil from the Business of Software forums made a survey for µISVs (micro independent software vendors). 96 people responded, including myself. The results are pretty interesting. It seems I'm like most average µISV people. Can't wait till part 2 to see the sales results.

Small progress update

Things are looking good for the new Watchdog - O - Matic release. I've received 1 bug report. Most users shouldn't encounter it and I'll be releasing a fix later this week (probably in the weekend). The 64 bit update of Service - O - Matic and Sniff - O - Matic are moving along nicely. I'll probably be able to release Sniff - O - Matic 1.07 in a few days. Service - O - Matic will have to wait cause I also need to implement some new features.

One of the disadvantages of the 64 bit versions is that the setup program is more than 2 times as big. The Watchdog - O - Matic trial went from 2 MB to 4.3 MB. Still very small compared to other downloads if you ask me (download takes less than a minute with a decent connection). But my server bandwidth usage is through the roof. I've contacted my web host and they assured me that it won't be any problem. Fingers crossed.

Watchdog - O - Matic 5.01 released

It took a while, but I'm finally ready with the new Watchdog – O – Matic release. I did a lot of testing on several operating systems, cause the number of changes I made in this version is huge.

I switched to a new compiler and created 64bit versions of the application. This required more work and changes than I thought, so thorough testing was needed. I also moved some basic features from the professional to the standard version making the standard version a more complete product. It didn't make sense to leave these features out.

All of this has some influence on the standard version. The biggest change is I no longer support Windows 95, 98 and Me. Supporting these old Windows versions was keeping some cool features out of the standard version. And our web visitor logs shows that the number of people still using these versions is very low.

What's up next? Creating 64bit versions for Sniff – O – Matic and Service – O – Matic. Wish me luck.