Crash Reporting Utility for Windows 7, MFC Application

Question

hi,

I'm having a MFC application (VS 2008) which is going to be deployed on Windows 7 machine. I need to distribute my application with debugging information, so that a debugable core will be generated in case of application crash event.

Can somebody please let me know how can I achieve this purpose ? I have read about minidump utility, just would like to whether there is a better way of generating coredump on windows 7 machine

Thank you

Answer 1

By default, both Debug and Release MSVC builds contain debug information. You don't need to distribute the program with .pdb files, but it is necessary to keep .pdb files for every released version. They are necessary to debug minidump files. Program itself must generate dump files when it crashes. Generally, working with minidumps looks like this:

1. Program crashes on a client site and produces minidump file.

2. minidump is sent to developer.

3. Developer restores the source code and .pdb files according to the program version, and debugs minidump file.

Finally, short introdunction to post-mortem debugging: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/debug/postmortemdebug_standalone1.aspx

AFAIK, this is the same for all Windows versions.