- WinDbg
Infobox_Software
name = WinDbg
caption =
developer =Microsoft
latest_release_version = 6.9.3.113
latest_release_date =April 29 ,2008
operating_system =Microsoft Windows
genre =Debugger
license = Commercial
website = [http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/debugging/default.mspx WinDbg at microsoft.com]WinDbg is a multipurpose
debugger forMicrosoft Windows , distributed on the web by Microsoft. It can be used to debuguser mode applications, drivers, and theoperating system itself inkernel mode . It is aGUI application, but has little in common with the more well-known, but less powerful,Visual Studio Debugger .WinDbg can be used for debugging kernel-mode memory dumps, created after what is commonly called the
Blue Screen of Death which occurs when abug check is issued. It can also be used to debug user-mode crash dumps. This is known as "postmortem debugging".WinDbg also has the ability to automatically load debugging
symbol files (e.g., PDB files) from a server by matching various criteria (e.g., timestamp, CRC, single or multiprocessor version). If a private symbol server is configured, the symbols can be correlated with thesource code for the binary. This eases the burden of debugging problems that have various versions of binaries installed on the debugging target by eliminating the need for finding and installing specific symbols version on the debug host. Microsoft has a public symbol server that has most of the public symbols for Windows 2000 and later versions of Windows (includingservice packs ).Recent versions of WinDbg have been distributed as part of the free
Debugging Tools for Windows suite, which shares a common debugging engine between WinDbg andcommand line debuggers like KD, CDB, and NTSD. This means that most commands will work in all alternative versions without modification, allowing users to use the style of interface with which they are most comfortable.Extensions
WinDbg allows loading of extension DLLs that can augment the debugger's supported commands and allow for help in debugging specific scenarios: for example, displaying an
MSXML document given an IXMLDOMDocument, or debugging the Common Language Runtime (CLR). These extensions are a large part of what makes WinDbg such a powerful debugger. WinDbg is used by theMicrosoft Windows product team to build Windows, and everything needed to debug Windows is included in these extension DLLs.While some extensions are used only inside Microsoft, most of them are part of the public Debugging Tools for Windows package.
!analyze
The most commonly-used extension is !analyze -v, which analyzes the current state of the program being debugged and the machine/process state at the moment of crash or hang. This extension is often able to debug the current problem in a completely automated fashion.
External links
* [http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/debugging/default.mspx Debugging Tools for Windows] - information and free downloads
* [http://software.rkuster.com/windbg/WinDBG_A_to_Z.pdf WinDbg. From A to Z! ] - Theory and examples (56 pages, 580 Kb)
* [http://software.rkuster.com/windbg/printcmd.htm Common WinDbg Commands (Thematically Grouped)]
* [http://www.networkworld.com/news/2005/041105-windows-crash.html Tutorial on solving system crashes using WinDbg]
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