how to create minidump for my process when it crashes

Question

Hi

I am not able to create minidump form my process by changing system setting.So my Question is

• Will system create a minidump for user process when they crashes

If yes , which setting i need to configure

• Or do i have to create minidump programmatically.

• How much effective minidumps are while investigating a crash

(Windows XP,C++,VC6)

~Regards

S.Singh

Answer 1

You need to programatically create a minidump (with one exception, see next link). CodeProject has a nice article on MiniDumps. Basically, you want to use dbghelp.dll, and use the function MiniDumpWriteDump() (see MSDN on MiniDumpWriteDump).

How effective such dumps are depends very much on the application. Sometimes, for optimized binaries, they are practically useless. Also, without experience, heap/stack corruption bugs will lead you astray.

However, if the optimizer was not too hard on you, there is a large class of errors where the dumps do help, namely all the bugs where having a stack-trace + values of the locally used variables is useful, i.e. many pure-virtual-function call things (i.e. wrong destruction order), access violations (uninitialized accessed or missing NULL checks), etc.

BTW, if your maintenance policy somehow allows it, port your application from VC6 to something acceptable, like VC8 or 9. You'll do yourself a big favor.

Answer 2

If you have a few bucks to spare AQtrace may be worth a look at. This has many of the advantages of the crash occurring inside the debugger, while running on a remote end user machine.

Answer 3

Thanks all for viewing and replying special thanks to gimpf, I goggled on internet and msdn.

I found an excellent article on debugInfo.com This is worth to read :

effective minidumps

Answer 4

We use Google Breakpad in Firefox, although that requires at least Visual C++ 2003. The nice side benefit is that it also supports OS X and Linux.