Memory Leak Detection with Visual Studio 2008

Brad Fish told me that Visual Studio 2008 was definitely worth the upgrade (especially on Vista), so I took the plunge. For a C++ programmer, I don't think it was as cool of a jump as 2003 to 2005 and not even close to the HUGE jump from 6 to 2003 (I skipped 2002), but it's still been a very nice upgrade.

But anyway, I have been working on making my own little SQLite3 C++ wrapper, because I just didn't like the ones that I could find out there. While doing that I also decided that it would be easiest to use a smart pointer to manage all of the pointers to SQLite stuff. I had played around with the Boost shared_ptr, but once again I just didn't like some of the syntax (mostly the custom deleter being in the constructor rather than a template parameter), so I just dusted off some old shared pointer code of my own and added a custom deleter to it.

It all seemed to be working just fine, but I just wanted to make sure that I was cleaning everything up properly and then I remembered that the current versions of Visual Studio don't dump out the memory leaks like Visual Studio 6 used to do by default. So I started some Googling and found this page. It says that it doesn't work with Express Edition, but it must be a typo or something, because it works (just not quite as described). Basically, here's what I was able to figure out from playing around with it. All you need to do is:
1) Add the header crtdbg.h
2) Call _CrtSetDbgFlag ( _CRTDBG_ALLOC_MEM_DF | _CRTDBG_LEAK_CHECK_DF );

You can find out more about _CrtSetDbgFlag() here, but calling it this way this will turn on the printing out of the memory leaks when your program exits (only when _DEBUG is defined).

After creating some artifical memory leaks, I noticed that it didn't dump the line that the memory was allocated on like it used to. So I did a little scavenging through the crtdbg.h header file and I found a conditional compile that would enable the printing of the allocation line. I added the two conditions to my code:
#define _CRTDBG_MAP_ALLOC
#define _CRTDBG_MAP_ALLOC_NEW
But unfortunately, this is just a mechanism to allow old code to still compile, because now it just prints the line in the crtdbg.h file. This is obviously useless (something that's I just noticed is also pointed out in the comments of the crtdbg.h file), so I guess this is the first thing I've found in the newer versions of Visual Studio that just aren't up to par with Visual Studio 6 (I know I didn't think I'd ever say/hear/read that either).

I guess that I should just be happy that I was able to get my memory leak dump again, but I'm still wondering why that's not on by default.