VC++ 6.0: Why is CASyncSocket::GetLastError() causing an access violation? - visual-c++

I'm using Visual C++ 6.0. I'm not sure of the service pack level of the visual studio installation, but the OS is Win 2K SP4. The failing code is part of a DLL.
Here's the code:
EIO::OpenConnection()
{
m_Client = new CSocket();
if(m_Client->Create() == 0) {
delete m_Client;
m_Client = NULL;
return CAsyncSocket::GetLastError();
}
if (!m_Client->Connect((LPCTSTR)m_IPAddress, 7)) {
delete m_Client;
m_Client = NULL;
return CAsyncSocket::GetLastError();
}
...<stuff>...
}
This compiles without error on my build system and executes without either of the calls to m_Client methods failing. When I move this DLL to the production system (Win 2K, not sure of service pack level yet), the call to m_Client->Connect() returns an error, so it goes into the IF block. CAsyncSocket::GetLastError() then the debugger to open and report an 0xC0000005 access violation. I don't understand this stuff enough to get anything out of the disassembly.
I've also tried CSocket::GetLastError() and m_Client->GetLastError() with the same results.
I'm fairly certain that m_Client->Connect() fails because of some security policy that's on the production machine that's absent on the development system, but I'd like to get the actual error code so I can help the IT guy narrow his search.
I haven't yet tried forcing a call to GetLastError() on my build system to see if I get an access violation there.

The GetLastError() method most likely calls WSAGetLastError().
But for WSAGetLastError() to work, WSACleanup() must not have been called yet.
I'm guessing that when you delete m_Client that exactly this happens.
Try calling GetLastError() before you delete the m_Client object.

Related

How to get a working x64 THREADSAFE Ghostscript DLL

Main context
We're actually trying to get a multi-threading version of Ghostscript x64 DLL, to make use of it through Ghostscript .NET. This component is supposed to "allow runing multiple Ghostscript instances simultaneously within a single process", but, as we have checked in our project, works fine until concurrent requests are made to the application. Same behavior can be replicated lauching same method using Tasks. The error description that raises in both cases, just when a call to the process is made until the last is being executed, is:
An error occured when call to 'gsapi_new_instance' is made: -100
Even it does no seem to be related with .NET directly, I will post a sample of our C# method code, just for contextualize.
// Define switches...
string[] switchesArray = switches.ToArray();
using (GhostscriptProcessor procesador = new GhostscriptProcessor())
{
try
{
procesador.StartProcessing(switchesArray, null);
byte[] destinationFile = System.IO.File.ReadAllBytes(destinationPath);
return destinationFile;
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
throw ex;
}
finally
{
System.IO.File.Delete(sourceFile);
}
}
THREADSAFE solution
Starting our investigation, we found this KenS's answer on this post, indicating that Ghostscript DLL must be generated with GS_THREADSAFE compiler definition.
To clarify, as we make use of Ghostscript 9.52 x64 to generate our PDFs, we need this x64 DLL compiled for Release configuration. After trying to compile Ghostscript sources on Windows 10 x64 machine, using Visual Studio Community 2017 and Visual Studio Community 2019, we finally managed to build and generate all items (only with VS Community 2019) without GS_THREADSAFE parameter, just to confirm that compilation is fine, and we check that the DLLs and executables are working. For this process we took in mind all we found in Ghostscript official documentation.
As we have no other guide to include this GS_THREADSAFE parameter, we followed the instructions given in this solution, including XCFLAGS="-DGS_THREADSAFE=1" on nmake build commands, usign this sentence for Rebuild all option:
cd .. && nmake -f psi\msvc32.mak WIN64= SBR=1 DEVSTUDIO= XCFLAGS=-DGS_THREADSAFE=1 && nmake -f psi\msvc32.mak WIN64= DEVSTUDIO= XCFLAGS=-DGS_THREADSAFE=1 bsc
This approach, rises an error during build:
Error LNK2019 unresolved external symbol errprintf_nomem referenced in
function gs_log_error File \mkromfs.obj 1
As it seems, the file mkromfs.c has a method called errprintf_nomem, which can't be found when GS_THREADSAFE is set.
Questions
1 - Is there any public release of Ghostscript that include x64 DLLs compiled to be THREADSAFE?
And, if not (that's what I'm guessing...)
2 - Is it possible to get this DLL to be THREADSAFE without changing the source code?
3- Could anyone provide, please, a step by step guide or walkthrough to build a x64 Ghostscript DLL using GS_THREADSAFE using Visual Studio (or even any other possible alternative) over Windows 10 x64?
4 - A few posts talk about people achive to manage multithreading using Ghostscript .NET. I assume this examples are all using a GS_THREADSAFE DLL... Is any other workaround we have passed?
Thank a lot in advance.
To summarize all this questions, and as a guide for future developers having this same trouble, these are the answers we've found until now:
AS #KenS mentions in his reply: "No, the Ghostscript developers don't actually build thread-safe versions of the binaries."
At this very moment, clearly not, as it has been reported on this opened bug.
As it seems to be a matter of commercial licensing support, we avoid comment on this point anymore.
Thanks again to #HABJAN. I absolutely take back what I've stated on my question, as it is possible to have Ghostscript .NET working on multi-threading scenarios. Below comes the solution we applied, in case it could be useful for someone.
Based on HABJAN example, what we have done to achieve this was to create a custom class to capture Ghostscript logging:
protected class ConsoleStdIO : Ghostscript.NET.GhostscriptStdIO
{
public ConsoleStdIO(bool handleStdIn, bool handleStdOut, bool handleStdErr) : base(handleStdIn, handleStdOut, handleStdErr)
{
}
public override void StdIn(out string input, int count)
{
char[] userInput = new char[count];
Console.In.ReadBlock(userInput, 0, count);
input = new string(userInput);
}
public override void StdOut(string output)
{
//log
}
public override void StdError(string error)
{
//log
}
}
For our previous method, we simple include a call to this class and this avoids errors when multiple tasks are executed at the same time:
// Define switches...
string[] switchesArray = switches.ToArray();
using (GhostscriptProcessor procesador = new GhostscriptProcessor())
{
try
{
procesador.StartProcessing(switchesArray, new ConsoleStdIO(true, true, true));
byte[] destinationFile = System.IO.File.ReadAllBytes(destinationPath);
return destinationFile;
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
throw ex;
}
finally
{
System.IO.File.Delete(sourceFile);
}
}
Well, it seems to me that you are asking here for technical support.
You clearly want to use Ghostscript in a commercial undertaking, indeed one might reasonably say you want an enterprise version of Ghostscript. Presumably you don't want to alter the source in order to permit you to use an open source license, because you don't want to pay for a commercial license.
With that in mind the answers to your questions are:
No, the Ghostscript developers don't actually build thread-safe versions of the binaries.
Currently, no. That's probably an oversight.
That would be a technical support question, there's no guarantee of technical support to free users, it's the one of the few areas of leverage for dual license vendors to persuade people to take up a commercial license. So I hope you will understand that I'm not going to provide that.
as far as I can see, no.

Getting error "attempting to detach while still running code" when calling JavaVm->DetachCurrentThread [duplicate]

I have an Android app that uses NDK - a regular Android Java app with regular UI and C++ core. There are places in the core where I need to call Java methods, which means I need a JNIEnv* for that thread, which in turn means that I need to call JavaVM->AttachCurrentThread() to get the valid env.
Previously, was just doing AttachCurrentThread and didn't bother to detach at all. It worked fine in Dalvik, but ART aborts the application as soon as a thread that has called AttachCurrentThread exits without calling DetachCurrentThread. So I've read the JNI reference, and indeed it says that I must call DetachCurrentThread. But when I do that, ART aborts the app with the following message:
attempting to detach while still running code
What's the problem here, and how to call DetachCurrentThread properly?
Dalvik will also abort if the thread exits without detaching. This is implemented through a pthread key -- see threadExitCheck() in Thread.cpp.
A thread may not detach unless its call stack is empty. The reasoning behind this is to ensure that any resources like monitor locks (i.e. synchronized statements) are properly released as the stack unwinds.
The second and subsequent attach calls are, as defined by the spec, low-cost no-ops. There's no reference counting, so detach always detaches, no matter how many attaches have happened. One solution is to add your own reference-counted wrapper.
Another approach is to attach and detach every time. This is used by the app framework on certain callbacks. This wasn't so much a deliberate choice as a side-effect of wrapping Java sources around code developed primarily in C++, and trying to shoe-horn the functionality in. If you look at SurfaceTexture.cpp, particularly JNISurfaceTextureContext::onFrameAvailable(), you can see that when SurfaceTexture needs to invoke a Java-language callback function, it will attach the thread, invoke the callback, and then if the thread was just attached it will immediately detach it. The "needsDetach" flag is set by calling GetEnv to see if the thread was previously attached.
This isn't a great thing performance-wise, as each attach needs to allocate a Thread object and do some internal VM housekeeping, but it does yield the correct behavior.
I'll try a direct and practical approach (with sample code, without use of classes) answering this question for the occasional developer that came up with this error in android, in cases where they had it working and after a OS or framework update (Qt?) it started to give problems with that error and message.
JNIEXPORT void Java_com_package_class_function(JNIEnv* env.... {
JavaVM* jvm;
env->GetJavaVM(&jvm);
JNIEnv* myNewEnv; // as the code to run might be in a different thread (connections to signals for example) we will have a 'new one'
JavaVMAttachArgs jvmArgs;
jvmArgs.version = JNI_VERSION_1_6;
int attachedHere = 0; // know if detaching at the end is necessary
jint res = jvm->GetEnv((void**)&myNewEnv, JNI_VERSION_1_6); // checks if current env needs attaching or it is already attached
if (JNI_EDETACHED == res) {
// Supported but not attached yet, needs to call AttachCurrentThread
res = jvm->AttachCurrentThread(reinterpret_cast<JNIEnv **>(&myNewEnv), &jvmArgs);
if (JNI_OK == res) {
attachedHere = 1;
} else {
// Failed to attach, cancel
return;
}
} else if (JNI_OK == res) {
// Current thread already attached, do not attach 'again' (just to save the attachedHere flag)
// We make sure to keep attachedHere = 0
} else {
// JNI_EVERSION, specified version is not supported cancel this..
return;
}
// Execute code using myNewEnv
// ...
if (attachedHere) { // Key check
jvm->DetachCurrentThread(); // Done only when attachment was done here
}
}
Everything made sense after seeing the The Invocation API docs for GetEnv:
RETURNS:
If the current thread is not attached to the VM, sets *env to NULL, and returns JNI_EDETACHED. If the specified version is not supported, sets *env to NULL, and returns JNI_EVERSION. Otherwise, sets *env to the appropriate interface, and returns JNI_OK.
Credits to:
- This question Getting error "attempting to detach while still running code" when calling JavaVm->DetachCurrentThread that in its example made it clear that it was necessary to double check every time (even though before calling detach it doesn't do it).
- #Michael that in this question comments he notes it clearly about not calling detach.
- What #fadden said: "There's no reference counting, so detach always detaches, no matter how many attaches have happened."

How can I overwrite an error message occured on custom action

I trigger an c# application by an custom action:
On failing condition, my application tells Install Shield to abort the installation process using an exit code:
static void Main(string[] args)
{
if(false)
{
Environment.ExitCode = 1;
}
}
Using this approach, Install shield´s setup displays an error message like expected:
How can I overwrite that error message by a custom text?
Reading between the lines here, it appears your custom action launches an EXE. If that is so, there is no way to do what you ask. You could show a message from your EXE before returning a non-zero exit code, but then Windows Installer would still show the Error 1722 message.
If you can instead run a function from a DLL, you have more options. Instead of returning errors, you'd be able to set properties (assuming this is an immediate mode action), and could use those properties to do further things, such as show another dialog, or exit the installation without the Error 1722 message. I don't think all the necessary configuration options are available in the limited edition - you certainly cannot edit dialogs in LE - so to do all of that, you would have to change to a more capable tool (including the Professional edition, or options from other vendors).

GCHandle, AppDomains managed code and 3rd party dll

I have looking at many threads about the exception "cannot pass a GCHandle across AppDomains" but I still don't get it....
I'm working with an RFID Reader which is driven by a DLL. I don't have source code for this DLL but only a sample to show how to use it.
The sample works great but I have to copy some code in another project to add the reader to the middleware Microsoft Biztalk.
The problem is that the process of Microsoft Biztalk works in another AppDomain. The reader handle events when a tag is read. But when I run it under Microsoft Biztalk I got this annoying exception.
I can't see any solution on how to make it work...
Here is some code that may be interesting :
// Let's connecting the result handlers.
// The reader calls a command-specific result handler if a command is done and the answer is ready to send.
// So let's tell the reader which functions should be called if a result is ready to send.
// result handler for reading EPCs synchronous
Reader.KSRWSetResultHandlerSyncGetEPCs(ResultHandlerSyncGetEPCs);
[...]
var readerErrorCode = Reader.KSRWSyncGetEPCs();
if (readerErrorCode == tKSRWReaderErrorCode.KSRW_REC_NoError)
{
// No error occurs while sending the command to the reader. Let's wait until the result handler was called.
if (ResultHandlerEvent.WaitOne(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(10)))
{
// The reader's work is done and the result handler was called. Let's check the result flag to make sure everything is ok.
if (_readerResultFlag == tKSRWResultFlag.KSRW_RF_NoError)
{
// The command was successfully processed by the reader.
// We'll display the result in the result handler.
}
else
{
// The command can't be proccessed by the reader. To know why check the result flag.
logger.error("Command \"KSRWSyncGetEPCs\" returns with error {0}", _readerResultFlag);
}
}
else
{
// We're getting no answer from the reader within 10 seconds.
logger.error("Command \"KSRWSyncGetEPCs\" timed out");
}
}
[...]
private static void ResultHandlerSyncGetEPCs(object sender, tKSRWResultFlag resultFlag, tKSRWExtendedResultFlag extendedResultFlag, tKSRWEPCListEntry[] epcList)
{
if (Reader == sender)
{
// Let's store the result flag in a global variable to get access from everywhere.
_readerResultFlag = resultFlag;
// Display all available epcs in the antenna field.
Console.ForegroundColor = ConsoleColor.White;
foreach (var resultListEntry in epcList)
{
handleTagEvent(resultListEntry);
}
// Let's set the event so that the calling process knows the command was processed by reader and the result is ready to get processed.
ResultHandlerEvent.Set();
}
}
You are having a problem with the gcroot<> helper class. It is used in the code that nobody can see, inside that DLL. It is frequently used by C++ code that was designed to interop with managed code, gcroot<> stores a reference to a managed object. The class uses the GCHandle type to add the reference. The GCHandle.ToIntPtr() method returns a pointer that the C++ code can store. The operation that fails is GCHandle.FromIntPtr(), used by the C++ code to recover the reference to the object.
There are two basic explanations for getting this exception:
It can be accurate. Which will happen when you initialized the code in the DLL from one AppDomain and use it in another. It isn't clear from the snippet where the Reader class object gets initialized so there are non-zero odds that this is the explanation. Be sure to keep it close to the code that uses the Reader class.
It can be caused by another bug, present in the C++ code inside the DLL. Unmanaged code often suffers from pointer bugs, the kind of bug that can accidentally overwrite memory. If that happens with the field that stores the gcroot<> object then nothing goes wrong for a while. Until the code tries to recover the object reference again. At that point the CLR notices that the corrupted pointer value no longer matches an actual object handle and generates this exception. This is certainly the hard kind of bug to solve since this happens in code you cannot fix and showing the programmer that worked on it a repro for the bug is very difficult, such memory corruption problems never repro well.
Chase bullet #1 first. There are decent odds that Biztalk runs your C# code in a separate AppDomain. And that the DLL gets loaded too soon, before or while the AppDomain is created. Something you can see with SysInternals' ProcMon. Create a repro of this by writing a little test program that creates an AppDomain and runs the test code. If that reproduces the crash then you'll have a very good way to demonstrate the issue to the RFID vendor and some hope that they'll use it and work on a fix.
Having a good working relationship with the RFID reader vendor to get to a resolution is going to be very important. That's never not a problem, always a good reason to go shopping elsewhere.

Low level Keyboard Hook works on one on Windows 7 x64 and not another

I have a problem when trying to hook the keyboard (not a keylogger!) I´m trying to automate Word, then i´m calling dll with a especific hook.
I have a desktop and a notebook (the two have same antivirus + windows 7 x64), the only diference is that in the notebook the windows was installed with a newer version. THE PROBLEM: In the notebook EVERYTHING WORKS FINE. But in the desktop odd things happen: the hook was installed and works well if targeted to Notepad, but, when targeted to Word, though the hook was installed, the call to a external function is supressed!
LRESULT CALLBACK HookProc(int code, WPARAM wParam, LPARAM lParam)
{
if (code<0) {
return CallNextHookEx(HookHandle,code,wParam,lParam);
}
bool callNextHook = true;
if (callFunction != NULL) {
// ONLY WITH WORD AND ONLY IN THE DESKTOP callFunction SEENS TO BE NULL!!!
// this is a pointer to a function in main application
callFunction(code,wParam,lParam,&callNextHook);
} else {
ShowMessage("THE UNKNOW ERROR! THIS MESSAGE IS SHOWED, THEN HOOK IS INSTALLED");
}
//Call the next hook in the chain
if (callNextHook) {
return CallNextHookEx(HookHandle,code,wParam,lParam);
}
return 0;
}
I already tried disabling antivirus, changing user account control, running the program as admin... nothing works. What is causing this difference?
It probably has to do with the LowLevelHooksTimeout value in the registry.
On faster machines, they can process the hooks fast enough and make it under the default 200 ms to process timeout. On slower machines, they have a harder time.
For me I've had to bump up this value from the default to 500 ms (0x1F4) for my application involving hooks, to be reliable across machines.
To see the effect of changing this registry value, you have to restart your computer.
See the fourth paragraph in the remarks on the documentation here:
LowLevelKeyboardProc callback function
The hook procedure should process a message in less time than the data
entry specified in the LowLevelHooksTimeout value in the following
registry key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop
The value is in
milliseconds. If the hook procedure times out, the system passes the
message to the next hook. However, on Windows 7 and later, the hook is
silently removed without being called. There is no way for the
application to know whether the hook is removed.
Hope that helps.
Seems to be a bug in rad studio xe2, compiling the hook dll with xe6 resolved the issue. Interesting, with this bug and some extra code, was possible to hook both 32 and 64 programs with only one dll. This way, I continue using the old dll compiled with xe2.

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