You’ve to enable memory leak tracking by defining constant – _CRTDBG_MAP_ALLOC and then call – _CrtDumpMemoryLeaks(). Now the leaks will be dumped to the Visual Studio output window. See the following code snippet.

// Declare this in header.
#define _CRTDBG_MAP_ALLOC
#include <crtdbg.h>
...
void DetectLeaks()
{
    // Create some leaks.
    CString* pString = new CString;
    BYTE* pBuffer = new BYTE[100];

    // Dump memory leaks to output window.
    _CrtDumpMemoryLeaks();
}

When you call _CrtDumpMemoryLeaks() the memory leak information will be dumped to the output window. For instance, see the dump for memory leaks that we’ve made in DetectLeaks().

Detected memory leaks!
Dumping objects ->
C:\Jijo\Studies\VC++\MFC\RabbitDlg\RabbitDlgDlg.cpp(183) : {194} normal block at 0x00294990, 100 bytes long.
 Data: <                > CD CD CD CD CD CD CD CD CD CD CD CD CD CD CD CD
C:\Jijo\Studies\VC++\MFC\RabbitDlg\RabbitDlgDlg.cpp(182) : {193} normal block at 0x00293B20, 4 bytes long.
 Data: <   _> 14 FB 8C 5F
...
Object dump complete.

The filename and line number of leak will be present in the dump. So easy, nah?

While creating your MFC applications, did you ever noticed a code block as follows in your files?

#ifdef _DEBUG
#define new DEBUG_NEW
#undef THIS_FILE
static char THIS_FILE[] = __FILE__;
#endif

This is for debug information. By using this information, the _CrtDumpMemoryLeaks() keep track of the filename. If you comment out this, the filename will not be present in the dump which will make our task difficult. So never remove those line. I swear, they are really important!

Targeted Audience – Intermediate