Pesky Memory Leaks

The team had a few cycles while the customer reviewed our latest design. One developer recalled some memory leaks that seemed to appear out of nowhere in our app. He showed them to me. The memory leaks appeared when we launched the app, logged in, logged out, and exited. That's a tiny amount of functionality. How could that cause a leak?

The developer did some research. We were all surprised at what he found. The character set had a value of "Use Multi-Byte Character Set". Ooops. We pretty much do single byte characters. You know, the old C-style strings. That wrong setting was causing memory leaks. Who knows what other problems this mismatch was causing.

This seemed strange. You get Unicode as the default setting when you create a project. Somebody must have changed that to MBCS. Why? Did they not know what this setting controlled? This is just disturbing. Time to look at the settings for all our Visual Studio projects. We really should have been detecting this earlier. Memory leaks are bad and need to be plugged.