VS 2003 Tip #16: Free debuggers

Life at MS got busy all of a sudden so as a result I blogged less this week. To continue on my last post, the free debuggers we provide are Dbgclr and the command line cordbg. Windbg with sos.dll is a great third one too.

The advantages of these debuggers is mostly their lightweight size. Cordbg was initially a sample developed by the CLR team to make sure they didnt break their code as they developed the debugging API's. The code for it is shipped in the Framework - you can find it under the Tools Developers Guide\Samples folder. Most of cordbg's functionality is available in the Everett debugger, but every now and then we find differences. The $exception feature in Everett was a feature that cordbg had initially - the ability to find the last exception thrown by a thread.

Dbgclr is more of a visual debugger that also ships in the Framework SDK. It can be found in the Guidebug folder in the SDK. It is pared down - but is a very good managed debugger. And its lightweight.

Questions? Let me know.