Windows 11 Win32 Debugging Patch for RAD Studio 11.1

There is a new patch (or hotfix) available for RAD Studio 11.1. The patch addresses an issue specific to debugging Win32 apps on Windows 11, where the IDE sometimes appears to freeze. Typical situations where you could observe the freeze include evaluating watches with side effects, opening the Threads view to switch threads, attaching to a process, and other common debugging actions. The issue is caused by getting the thread wait chain (GetThreadWaitChain()), which sometimes takes up to a minute. It is resolved by disabling the thread wait chain feature in the debugger.

The exact cause of the thread wait chain delay is unknown but it appears to be related to a thread having a socket open, possibly where the thread is waiting to finish network IO.

Thread wait chain information is disabled for Win32 on both Windows 10 and Windows 11. There is an environment variable to re-enable it if you need the feature: set DBK_ENABLE_WAITCHAIN=1 on a command prompt, and run RAD Studio (alternatively, set that environment variable globally for Windows.) Only Windows 11 is affected by the issue, so you only need to install the patch on Windows 11.

Installation

You can download this in GetIt (our recommended technique; also it will show as available on the Welcome Page when you start the IDE) or install manually after downloading from my.embarcadero.com (the zip file contains a batch file installer.)

The RAD Studio 11.1 Welcome screen showing the ‘Patch available’ button. Click this to install patches, including this one.

Remote Debugging

Because this patches the debugger, if you do remote debugging you will also need to update PAServer on the remote machine. The patch installer replaces the (your RAD Studio install location)PAServersetup_paserver.exe file, but you’ll need to copy that over to the remote machine and install it. There are full details in the patch readme.