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Why use windbg vs the Visual Studio (VS) debugger ?
I Use Visual Studio 2005 for C++ development.
What does WinDbg give me, that Visual Studio doesn't?
I know its good for client installations and remote debugging, as it's easy to install.
Other reasons? What are your favorite functions/commands?
In WinDbg you could force to load PDB file that has incompatible (with EXE) checksum/date. Just write .symopt+0x40 in command line. Visual Studio doesn't allows that.
From Wiki:
WinDbg can be used to debug user mode applications, drivers, and the operating system itself in kernel mode. It is a GUI application, but has little in common with the more well-known, but less powerful, Visual Studio Debugger.
WinDbg can be used for debugging kernel-mode memory dumps, created after what is commonly called the Blue Screen of Death which occurs when a bug check is issued. It can also be used to debug user-mode crash dumps. This is known as Post-mortem debugging.
With WinDbg you have the ability to remotely debug an application with two WinDbg instances (client/server). That can be quite handy to debug an already deployed application at the customers site.