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Why use windbg vs the Visual Studio (VS) debugger ?
I Use Visual Studio 2005 for C++ development.
What does WinDbg give me, that Visual Studio doesn't?
I know its good for client installations and remote debugging, as it's easy to install.
Other reasons? What are your favorite functions/commands?
In WinDbg you could force to load PDB file that has incompatible (with EXE) checksum/date. Just write .symopt+0x40 in command line. Visual Studio doesn't allows that.
From Wiki:
WinDbg can be used to debug user mode applications, drivers, and the operating system itself in kernel mode. It is a GUI 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 a bug check is issued. It can also be used to debug user-mode crash dumps. This is known as Post-mortem debugging.
With WinDbg you have the ability to remotely debug an application with two WinDbg instances (client/server). That can be quite handy to debug an already deployed application at the customers site.
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I have Visual Studio Enterprise 2015 and a native C++ project. I would like to analyze memory usage. Our software runs as a Windows service, so I typically debug by attaching to the running service. I found that when I do that the Diagnostic Tools Memory Usage is not available:
However, when I start the software through the debugger (by pressing F5) the Memory Usage tool shows up:
Is it supposed to be like that, ie. is the Memory Usage Diagnostic Tool not supported when attaching to a process?
The Memory Usage Diagnostic Tool is missing both when attaching to a locally running process as well as when remote debugging (attaching to a process on another machine).
The Diagnostic Tools native memory profiler will support attaching to a process in the upcoming Visual Studio 2015 Update 1. There will be a CTP preview release coming out this Fall that you can try out.
I use stackwalk64 to generate stacktraces for C++ in visual studio 2008 using the latest symchk.exe and dbghlp.dll. This works fine when I'm running the standalone exe. However, when the debugger is attached I deadlock visual studio. I previously had a workaround where I downloaded all of the system32 symbols to disk and this worked well, but a recent update seems to have broken my workaround even though I updated the symbols. Ideally I would like to determine if the visual studio debugger is attached (it will only ever be the VS debugger) so I can turn off my stack traces in that case. Thanks for any help.
Use IsDebuggerPresent and possibly CheckRemoteDebuggerPresent
I tried to use a Performance wizard tool for my short C++ testing in VS 2010 Ultimate.
But for any code the profiling process crashes and the following error occurs:
Could not launch xxx.exe. Injection of runtime library failed.
By this time I used Netbeans and with the VS 2010 profiler I do not have much experience.
I wonder whether this function is available for unmanaged C++... The C++ code is correct...
Configuration: VS 2010 Ultimate, Win 7 Prof. 32 bit.
Updated question:
An instrumentation method works well but the CPU sampling method still does not work.
Yes, the profiler works on native code.
Try running Visual Studio as an elevated admin user.
Check if you have enabled Application Verifer shims for your application.
This problem can be caused by some security or anti-malware program installing hooks in your program, so the profiler cannot get its hooks in. Some vendors provide ways to limit those hooks so you can profile, or you could just try turning it off for a period while profiling.
To get the dump file (for crashes) I am using the userModeProcessorDumper.exe. Now the question is how to read this file (to see the stack information). Regarding this I have couple of questions
Yes I know I can use WinDbg (related tools) to analyze the .dmp file. My question is - Can this be analyzed in Visual Studio? To be more specific - I am having Visual Studio Enterprise Edition 6 - In this particular pack - can the .dmp file be opened for analysis.
If Yes, Please help me with steps.
I see in web advice to use Visual Studio 2XXX version. So I am feeling that the same cannot be done using VS Enterprise Edition.
The application is built on MinGW, even these application - can we analyze in Visual Studio (what ever is the edition - i.e Visual Studio 2XXX or VS Enterprise Edition X.Y)? Should I take care of any additional setting for this.
Any material link on this topic would be very helpful to me.
Thanks a lot in advance for your advice.
PS : My application is a C++ based application.
From what I remembered, VS6 cannot be used to debug dumps. It's been a while since I last used it, and trying to verify me memory I came across a workaround that might allow you to debug those dumps after all: Visual C++ 6, and post-mortem (crash dump) debugging.
I don't have VC6 at hand, and have no idea if this really works. Other than that, I feel for you... There are IDEs so much better than VC6. Hope this inability gives you the push towards an upgrade. Debugging dumps is really easy with VC7 and above.
I would like to run my Qt application on a computer which haven't visual 2008 installed.
It seems I can't manage to use QODBC driver in debug mode on this computer.
All is ok in release.
Any ideas ?
Thanks!
Have you dropped the VS2008 debug runtime where your qodbc driver ist installed?
VS2008 has it's debug runtime here by default
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\redist\Debug_NonRedist\x86
The easiest tool to solve "it doesn't load" problems on Windows is Dependency Walker aka Depends. Used in profiling mode, it will trace which DLLs the program loads, and in case of a failure it will show you where a DLL failed to load. This is especially useful when a program does load on one machine, since you can then compare the two logs.