# Wednesday, October 29, 2008

I have been coding web applications In Visual Studio since Visual InterDev was introduced in 1997.  Over that time, I have seen a wild array of error messages, but yesterday, while debugging an ecommerce web application using Commerce Server, I got this interesting message that I have never seen before:

 

Object is in a zombie state?  I wonder what that really means? 

Clicking Yes, produced this dialog box:

Huh? How can an object be a “zombie” and how can debugging be stopped, but not yet complete?  I know it is Halloween, but... oooooo pretty scary, huh kids!

Wednesday, October 29, 2008 10:08:08 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [1]
Friday, October 31, 2008 11:59:57 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
Speaking of my experience with Obj-C/Cocoa here; no VS experience, but… "zombie" objects are a debugging technique that replaces real objects with so-called "zombies" when they are deallocated. A message that is sent to a zombie object will raise an exception (the message would otherwise either be lost, corrupt memory, etc …).
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