Visual Studio 2010 debug minidump

Question

Hi all,

Consider the following code (written with Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0)

using System;

namespace DumpTester
{
 class Program
 {
  static void Main(string[] args)
  {
   int test = new Random().Next();


   Console.WriteLine(test + new Random().Next());

   Test();

  }

  private static void Test()
  {
   throw new Exception();
  }
 }
}

When running outside of Visual Studio you get this nice window of Microsoft Windows 7 that it is looking for a solution. Obviously, since this is my app, there is none. At that point I create a full dump file of my application with for example Process Explorer.

I then open that dmp file from its location and try to debug. But whatever I try, it can't find the location of the source symbols. I tried putting the pdb next to the dump but it just doesn't find it.

The application is built with 32bit settings and I am trying to debug on a 32bit machine. When I set my settings to 64bit it works perfectly.

But the problem is that the app I'm using HAS to be 32bit.

So can you debug 32bit dumps on 64bit windows?

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

You can debug 32-bit dumps on a 64-bit machine no problem. I'd suggest giving this excellent blog post by John Robbins a read when it comes to PDB files, here