Thread: my Visual Studio Ultimate 2013 is messed up

There is nothing wrong with Visual Studio. This is what it looks like when your code crashes. You have a bug somewhere.

If you bother to look in the window, you'll see it's pointing to the call to scanf_s(). Probably a buffer overflow.

Originally Posted by fouzimedfouni

The code compiled about 6 times before I messed with the VS

Just because your code compiles, does not mean it has no bugs.

The screenshot you posted clearly shows an application crash, with the debugger stopped at a specific line of code. If you don't understand what you are looking at, we can help explain it to you. But if you don't believe me, I'm not sure how I can help.

Your problem is that you use scanf_s like scanf, but scanf_s needs additional parameter.
If you use special functions from Microsoft you should know this.

Look: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/w40768et.aspx

Originally Posted by Microsoft

Unlike scanf and wscanf, scanf_s and wscanf_s require the buffer size to be specified for all input parameters of type c, C, s, S, or string control sets that are enclosed in []. The buffer size in characters is passed as an additional parameter immediately following the pointer to the buffer or variable. For example, if you are reading a string, the buffer size for that string is passed as follows:

char s[10];

scanf_s("%9s", s, _countof(s)); // buffer size is 10, width specification is 9

The buffer size includes the terminating null. You can use a width specification field to ensure that the token that's read in will fit into the buffer. If no width specification field is used, and the token read in is too big to fit in the buffer, nothing is written to that buffer.

Originally Posted by smokeyangel

I think (sorry, I'm on Linux today) that there is an "exceptions" dialog box you can get at in VS (think it's under the debug menu). My memory is a little hazy but I seem to remember that if you turn off exception catching then it's a lot easier to see what's gone wrong.

I only have VS2010 in front of me here, it may have moved slightly in 2013. Go to the Debug menu and choose "Exceptions..." A dialog will appear showing a tree view. Open the entry labeled "Win32 Exceptions." There will be a bunch of different codes listed. The easiest thing is to just turn on all of them. The specific type of exception in OP's example is 0xC0000005, so in theory you could just check that one.

Forgetting that, I don't bother with those and just click the "Break" button when the crash dialog appears. That puts you in the debugger.

But in the interests of being fair -- what exactly do you think you did to screw up your debugger? If you've been messing with the property settings, it may be worth starting a new project and copying your source over..... but I'd bet that the same thing would happen again.

The code is probably displaying undefined behavior. If you change a compiler setting (for instance, optimization level, CRT version, etc) who knows what will happen.

Originally Posted by fouzimedfouni

no sir, I really appreciate your help, and I did not mean anything bad , I apologize if you got offended or misunderstood my question

No offense was taken. Hope you solved your problem.

If you want to learn C then just continue learning C.

No, C and C++ are different. Yes, C++ has deliberate native support for object oriented programming techniques.