VPMD

Smalltalk V/PM Debugger

David Ornstein
INTERSOLV



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YOU MUST HAVE A SMALLTALK VIRTUAL MACHINE VPMVM13.DLL DATED
AFTER 12/3/91. (IN OTHER WORDS, POST 1.3 PRODUCTION!) THERE
IS A FAIRLY NEW DLL ON THE DIGITALK COMPUSERVE FORUM IN THE TECH
SUPPORT AREA...

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VPMD is a tool that can be used to track down hard-to-track
problems in a Smalltalk environment. In particular, it was
designed to help with catching and diagnosing GP faults. When
a GP fault happens, VPMD will execute some internal diagnostic
functions and produce a log file that contains as much
information as possible about the cause of the GP fault.

There are two major modes of usage for VPMD: manual and
automatic. In most situations, you will simply run VPMD in
automatic mode. This means that when you type 'VPMD',
Smalltalk will startup and if all goes well, when you exit the
system or application, you will return to the command prompt.
If anything bad happens during the execution (e.g., a GP fault),
a logfile (VPMD.LOG) will be created that describes a fair bit
of information that may help track down the GP fault. In
particular, it often contains a dump of the Smalltalk message
stack that was in progress when the product faulted.

To start VPMD in manual mode, type:

vpmd

This will start the Smalltalk development environment. If
you wish to start the runtime environment, use:

vpmd -pgm v

Using the -pgm argument, you can override the default program
that VPMD starts (which is VPM.EXE).

In manual mode, you use the -noauto switch to cause VPMD to
place you at the command prompt as soon as Smalltalk has
been loaded. Smalltalk will not have been started (only
loaded). You type 'go' and Smalltalk starts. Under various
circumstances, control will return to VPMD. In particular,
when the Smalltalk process completes (successfully or with
a fault), control returns to VPMD.


There are lots of other things in VPMD, but I'm not going to
try to document them in a text file. They're documented in the
full documentation (which you should have gotten if you got this
file!) For now, though, you can get a sense of them by looking in
two places: command-line switches and the help command. Command
line switches are described by executing:

vpmd -?

Help can be obtained with the HELP command. Start vpmd and type
HELP. Remember that you must be in manual mode to get the
command prompt:

C:\> vpmd -noauto

VPMD - V/PM Debugger V0.9
Loaded C:\PROJ\VPMD\vpm.exe a b c

help





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For more information, or a free copy of the nicely-formatted, printed
documentation contact:

David Ornstein
INTERSOLV
408-988-7575 (voice)
408-988-7961 (fax)


Duplication of this software or documentation for commercial use
is stricty prohibited. This tool (VPMD) may be used during the
software development process, but may not be distributed with
any commercial software package without the written permission
of the author. (Note that I'm likely to give the permission
freely; I just want to keep track of where VPMDis being used.)