ADM dialog hangs but on debugging it works fine. Can't spot the problem

Question

Hello,
I have developed an automate plugin which submits a design on a server using libcurl library. There is a dialog(made using ADM) to submit a design which consists of a submit button and a progress bar. On clicking the submit button, the progress bar starts getting updated. When the progress bar is completely updated the dialog seems to hang. The dialog is supposed to close after submit. The obvious way to search for the problem was to debug the source code, but it appears that whenever the source code is debugged then it runs smoothly. But without any debug points the problem reverts. How can we spot the problem without debugging?
Please guide.

Answer 1

In developing plug-ins over the past years I have encountered a few cases where the presence of the debugger seemed to work around a problem.  The debugger necessarily changes the timing and resource allocations some.
In every case the problem turned out to be a legitmate bug - a mistake we had made in our code, and in some cases finding that bug required other measures beyond using the debugger to help us track it down.  We ended up implementing a very sophisticated logging facility that we use in all our products now.  It appends lines of text containing pertinent info into a log file that's created for each run.  The detailed logging commands compile-out in a Release build, so we just leave them in the source code all the time and they add no overhead.
Unfortunately, there's no easy answer for your dilemma, other than to advise you to implement your own logging facility - or at least the ability to add printf statements (or similar) into your code so you can trace the progress in sticky situations.
Though I saw your message and am a plug-in developer myself, you might find you can get more direct help in the SDK forum...
http://forums.adobe.com/community/photoshop/photoshop_sdk
Good luck!
-Noel