Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 Unleashed

Debugging Multithreaded Applications

A multithreaded application is one in which more than a single thread is running in a given process. By default, each process that runs your application has at least one thread of execution. You might create multiple threads to do parallel processing. This can significantly improve performance, especially when run on today’s multicore processors and hyperthreading technology. However, multithreading comes at a cost. The code can be more complex to write and more difficult to debug. If you’ve ever written a multithreaded application, you already know this. For example, just stepping line-by-line in a multi-threaded application to debug it might have you jumping from one thread to another. You would then have ...