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 Visual Assist
 Feature Requests
 Support saving memory via VA Memory View
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robh
New Member

7 Posts

Posted - Apr 03 2018 :  09:50:47 AM  Show Profile  Reply with Quote
Hello

One feature I would love to see supported is to "dump" small areas of memory to file.

The default memory viewer inside Visual Studio supports viewing enough memory, but the dialog window is useless - copying memory requires fiddly Alt+Shift+Mouse to manually select and copy the hex dump!

feline
Whole Tomato Software

United Kingdom
19025 Posts

Posted - Apr 03 2018 :  2:08:11 PM  Show Profile  Reply with Quote
Have you considered copying whole lines from the memory viewer window, and then doing a search and replace to just extract the hex dump "column" out of the copied lines? Place the mouse before the start of the line, click and drag down.

Using a text editor, doing a regular expression find and replace does this form me. Here I used the search string
^.*  (.*)  .*$
where that is two spaces in each of the blank spots. The replacement string is just "\1" without the double quotes.

Doing the same thing in VS2017, with the IDE's find and replace regular expressions works with the same search string, but the replace string needs to be "$1" instead, again without the double quotes.

zen is the art of being at one with the two'ness
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robh
New Member

7 Posts

Posted - Apr 04 2018 :  04:33:18 AM  Show Profile  Reply with Quote
Thank you for your suggestion feline. I am doing something very similar (well identical.. except the regex!) at the moment to extract binary data from memory but it seems I am stuck with it!
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feline
Whole Tomato Software

United Kingdom
19025 Posts

Posted - Apr 04 2018 :  08:05:20 AM  Show Profile  Reply with Quote
If we tried to do something here, what would you want / need? One option is to replace / duplicate the IDE memory view window, but that seems a bit excessive. But trying to hook into the window and change the basic rules of how selecting text works also seems like a mess.

Another thought is to have a look at this utility - https://www.clipboardfusion.com/

I use it myself, but only use a few basic features, but in theory you should be able to set this to monitor the clipboard, and when you copy whole lines of text from the memory viewer window into the clipboard, have it recognise the pattern and then automatically do the search and replace to strip out just the column you want. So the end result will be the same, but without having to do the replace manually.

zen is the art of being at one with the two'ness
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robh
New Member

7 Posts

Posted - Apr 04 2018 :  09:31:22 AM  Show Profile  Reply with Quote
It wouldn't need to extend the IDE memory view window, rather a menu option to dump out a region of memory.

Something like:

VAssistX -> Debug -> VA Memory Dump


Which opens a dialog with these fields:


Address: address_or_symbol_name
Size: unsigned_size_in_bytes
Destination: file_path

save_button
progress_bar


One of my use-cases is dealing with external image data. After the image is downloaded I'd like to extract parts of it from memory.
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feline
Whole Tomato Software

United Kingdom
19025 Posts

Posted - Apr 04 2018 :  2:58:41 PM  Show Profile  Reply with Quote
This makes more sense, and seems a lot more reasonable as a feature request to put in for our developers to consider. What "format" should the memory be dumped in? Just open a file and write out the memory block directly? That seems to be all that is required, I am just wondering if that will cause any unwanted side effects.

zen is the art of being at one with the two'ness
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