Hello!

Hi Everyone!

My name is Andy Luhrs, and I'm one of the Program Managers on Debugging Tools for Windows. Our team has decided to start up a blog to get some more tips and tutorials out to people around updates and changes to our debugging tools (WinDbg, kernel debugging, AppVerifier, etc.) There's tons of blogs about debugging difficult or weird issues (Raymond's is my favorite), and the main goal of this isn't to cover that type of stuff. The plan is to have a few people across our team contribute, so expect to see a variety of perspectives. We're largely aiming to look at and highlight some of the under the hood type changes that doesn't fit in our normal MSDN documentation, and talk about features in the preview releases of the SDK that don't have full documentation written for them yet. We'll do our best to update our blog posts to point to official documentation when it's available.

So here's a few quick tips to get started:

  1. Stay up to date! We make a lot of changes behind the curtains that improve command performance, reliability, and output. It's definitely worth staying on the SDK preview versions of WinDbg when they're available.
  2. Try running 'dx Debugger' and click around the DML links and learn what's the in the namespaces there. We'll be going a bit more in-depth on what's possible with 'dx' and what some of the more interesting namespaces are in future posts. Or even better, try 'dx -r3 @$cursession.Devices.DeviceTree' while in a kernel session.
  3. If you're using something like a laptop or Surface, you might hate that it doesn't have a "Break" key. We added Alt+Delete as an alternative key combination to break-in.

We're aiming to make posts with every SDK preview release that has major changes, when we have a question that gets asked frequently, and when we have good tutorials or tips that we want to share out. Feel free to use comments to ask for elaboration or details, and we'll do our best to follow-up.

 

-Andy Luhrs

@aluhrs13