Dump only a portion of memory in VS 2005

Question

Does any one know if there is a way to dump only a chunk of memory to disk using VS? Basically, I want to give it an address and a length, and have it write the memory to disk. That way I can do a binary diff. Thanks.

Answer 1

I believe you can only save a complete binary minidump. However, you can use the Debug Memory window and copy/paste to a text file to do memory diffs.

Answer 2

OK, this I have tried in VS 2008, but I believe VS 2005 should allow the same:

If the memory is a string (if it doesn't contain zero bytes), you can put the following into a watch window: (unsigned char*)(ptr),1024 to see 1kB in the text visualizer. However, this stops at zero bytes, so if you have binary data, this won't work.

Answer 3

I'm kind of surprised VS won't let you do that from the Memory dump window...

You might be able to get what you want (or close to it) with the VS command window:

>Tools.LogCommandWindowOutput c:\temp\testdump.log /overwrite
>Debug.ListMemory /Count:16 0x00444B20
0x00444B20  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 13 00 12 00 86 07 19 00  ................
>Tools.LogCommandWindowOutput /off

If you're willing to use WinDBG, (or ntsd/cdb) you can use the .writemem debugger command to do exactly what you want.