How to configure WinDbg to be one of the optional debuggers when application hit a user defined break point?

Question

Hi,
when an application on my machine encounter a user defined break point it windows opens a dialog that let me choose a debugger to attach to the process.
Currently it offers me to choose one of the two versions of visual studio that installed on my machine (2008 or 2010) I want to add to the options WinDbg.
Is it possible?

Answer 1

There used to be (in VS2005, I think) an undocument way to do this, but it doesn't seem to work in VS2008 or 2010. You used to be able to run vs7jit.exe /RegisterOld "C:\debuggers\windbg.exe" "Windbg". I can't find how to add it to the list in VS2008 or VS2010.

However, you can set the default debugger to be WinDbg. This would replace the VSJitDebugger.exe that is the default (which is what gives you the two Visual Studio versions to choose from).

For the .Net Framework 4, you can set this in the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AeDebug key under the Debugger value. Just put in the path to WinDbg. For versions of the Framework previous to 4, the key is HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\.NETFramework and the value name is DbgManagedDebugger.

Here's some additional information on launching debuggers: http://blogs.msdn.com/shawnfa/archive/2004/07/15/184490.aspx