DebugView

DebugView, shown in Figure A-1, is an application that enables you to monitor debug output on your local system or any computer on the network that you can reach via TCP/IP. It is capable of displaying both kernel mode and Win32 debug output, so you don’t need a debugger to catch the debug output your applications or device drivers generate, nor do you need to modify your applications or drivers to use nonstandard debug output APIs.

Figure A-1

Under Windows NT, 2000, XP, Server 2003, and Vista, DebugView will capture the following:

• Win32 OutputDebugString

• Kernel mode DbgPrint

• All variants of DbgPrint implemented in Windows XP and Server 2003

DebugView also extracts kernel mode debug output generated before a crash from Windows NT/2000/XP crash dump files if DebugView was capturing at the time of the crash.

Simply execute the DebugView program file (dbgview.exe) and DebugView will immediately begin capturing debug output. Note that if you run DebugView on Windows NT/2K/XP, you must have administrative privileges to view kernel mode debug output. Menus, hotkeys, and/or toolbar buttons can be used to clear the window, save the monitored data to a log file, recall previously saved log files, log all debug output directly to a file, search debug output, filter debug input, change the window font, and more.

The only caveat I would add is that searching the output window for a test is a little buggy. If you really need to find a specific debug string in a long output list, I would suggest saving the debug output to a log file and using your favorite editor to search for the string.