Advanced bug reporting

  • Article

A commenter asks about reporting crashes when working in a private network.

There's another way to send in a crash, but it invloves a bunch of manual labor, on both your side & and on mine. One of the advantages is that it's good for reporting hangs, both soft & hard.

  1. Launch a second instance of devenv.
  2. Tools.DebugProcesses
  3. Set Engine=Native
  4. Attach to Devenv.
  5. Debug.SaveDump
    1. SaveAs: Minidump
    2. save devenv.mdmp
  6. Debug.SaveDump again
    1. SaveAs: Minidump with heap
    2. save devenv-full.mdmp
  7. Debug.Windows.Threads window
  8. Double click on the first thread
  9. Open callstack window
  10. Select all, copy, and email it to me with devenv.mdmp. Include repro steps if you can

The devenv-full.mdmp file is enormous, and emailing it is cumbersome. Hold on to it for later.

This is enough information for us to diagnose most crashes. 

Oh, to email me - jaybaz is my email alias at microsoft.com.

It's going to be interesting to see if I get sent a lot of reports of crashes we already know, or what. I may be opening Pandora's box here!