Chapter 13: Advanced Debugging

Advanced Debugging

A variety of tools are available for advanced debugging. Many of these tools are downloaded from the Debugging Tools for Windows Web site. Windbg, the latest version of Son of Strike (SOS.DLL), and Auto-Dump Plus are three of the most valuable tools received from the download.

Windbg is a native and kernel debugger, which is commonly used by software support engineers to diagnose problems. It supports live and postmortem debugging. Live debugging is performed by attaching the debugger to a running process. Postmortem analysis is conducted via dump files. This includes examining memory, evaluating call stacks, setting breakpoints, viewing threads, and much more. SOS.DLL is a debugger extension that publishes commands for managed debugging. Son of Strike can be used in Windbg and Visual Studio 2005, as shown earlier in this chapter.

Mdg is the new managed debugger. As the dedicated managed debugger, it offers features that are found neither in Visual Studio debugger nor in Windbg products.