WinDbg is something I have never really used, actually I just ran through a couple demos a few years ago. I always see serious engineers using this as their debugger and I wan’t to grow up to be a serious engineer so I set out to learn WinDbg once again. Actually, if you can’t hear the trauma in my voice I am still recovering from the mother of all bugs and I am prepping myself for the next time I get a crazy issue.

I can’t really give you a reason to use WinDbg yet, but if you want a legitimate reason, you can check out this answer on Stack, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/105130/why-use-windbg-vs-the-visual-studio-vs-debugger. I have had my share of ugly debug problems and I want to know if WinDbg will give me more insight. So, I will learn now and the next time one of those debug problems rears its ugly head I will hit it with WinDbg and see what I get.

Install

Try this at your own risk and don’t attempt this at home and all that legal stuff. For me this was Difficult! (with a capital D)

First there isn’t a stand alone version that I could find. So, I had to install the Windows SDK. Then I had to find a version compatible with my environment, Windows 7 and .Net 4. Most links to the SDK redirect to the newest version. After many install, uninstall, Google, install, uninstall Google loops the correct process for my computer was this (it may be different for you).

1. Uninstall Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 x64 Redistributable and Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 x86 Redistributable
2. Uninstall Microsoft Visual C++ Compilers 2010 SP1Standard x64 and Microsoft Visual C++ Compilers 2010 SP1Standard x86
3. Install the Windows 7.1 SDK – http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=8279
4. Your installation will only be partially complete after the compiler error. Install the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Service Pack 1 Compiler Update for the Windows SDK 7.1 – http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/confirmation.aspx?id=4422.
5. Re-run your Windows SDK web installer. Choose the first option to add features to the existing installation.
6. Re-choose (either under redistributables or common) the desired features, including the Debugger Tools.

If you have errors, I recommend you open the log in notepad and look for the reason for failure and plug it into Google. I was able to resolve a few issues like that and I don’t care to rehash what I went through as its boring as hell and painful to talk about.

On my setup I find WinDbg here – C:\Program Files\Debugging Tools for Windows (x64)

Specify Symbol Location

As you probably know the Visual Studio debugger works with symbols to provide you with information about the source code you are debugging. WinDbg is no different and you should tell it where to find your symbols.

_NT_SYMBOL_PATH
C:\symbols; SRV*C:\symbols*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols

*Note: This is a global setting and will affect symbol loading in Visual Studio. Found out about this the hard way and got some good info on issues it can cause here, http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mahuja/archive/2008/07/08/resolving-very-slow-symbol-loading-with-vs-2008-during-debugging.aspx.

This tells WinDbg where to look for code symbols. In this example WinDbg would first check the symbols folder, then if not found it would check the CachedSymbols folder, then if it is till not found it would try to download from Microsoft symbols server and store it in the CachedSymbols folder.

Basic Commands

If you want some basic WinDbg commands and a quick start you can check out http://mtaulty.com/communityserver/blogs/mike_taultys_blog/archive/2004/08/03/4656.aspx. I am too lazy to blog about my experience with my basic WinDbg walk through. I will update the blog when I get to really flex WinDbg’s muscles.

Anyway, if you are a brave sole or one of those coding genius types and you actually try WinDbg, I hope it provides you with some extra fire power in your debug arsenal.