Category: Win32

An interesting issue happened these days when I tried to port some apps to Vista. Basically all .NET apps compiled with Visual Studio 2005/2008 are marked “NX compatible” by default. If your .NET app uses an incompatible DLL or COM object, the app will crash. What I found funny was that the message was a standard access violation error instead of a more specific DEP error. Debugging it was not easy: I was unable to step through the code in VS2005 and using WinDbg wasn’t much of help too, except that the line where it crashed was something like a mov [esp+24h], constant with ESP well within limits — an instruction which should not generate an access violation exception given the current ESP value.  At that point I was starting to think that my “attempt to read or write protected memory“ was, in fact, something else. Luckily my mind went to DEP and in less than 1 minute of Google search I was able to find this link with a good solution which, for the lazy and to preserve history is to add the following two lines as a post-build step. call “$(DevEnvDir)..\tools\vsvars32.bat” editbin.exe /NXCOMPAT:NO $(TargetPath) I tried, without much faith, and it worked. And the C# app was finally working on Vista. And while you are fuddling with post-builds, go on and enable LARGEADDRESSAWARE while you are at it. 32bit users will thank you.

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