How do I perform post-mortem debugging for Windows applications?

Question

I develop unmanaged C++ applications in MSVC2008. And occasionally the application crashes at the customer site. I found an article on this. But it was written in 2002 for Visual Studio .NET. Has things changed since? Can the same technique be used? Is there a newer method?

Answer 1

If you are debugging C and C++ apps for Windows, you want to learn how to use WinDBG (distributed as "debugging tools for Windows"). It has a bit of a learning curve, but the documentation is really good and it really is the best the platform has to offer.

As to your question, you can view a crash dump with windbg -z <dump filename>.

Answer 2

Usually release mode binaries (which typically run at customer site) are built with optimization (for speed/memory etc). Troubleshooting optimized binaries is usually not as easy.

So, first check if the crash is reproducible with release mode binaries built without optimization. If yes, then the job is easy (ier).

Here is some info.

Also look at a tool called ADPlus from microsoft