Get the Exception Trace ( or the Log File) when VS 2008 Crashes

Question

My VS 2008 has a lot of plugins such as Resharper, Syncfusion, Typemock, TestDriven.net and you-name-it. And I am always running all of them on the latest beta versions.

The problem is that this morning the VS 2008 crashed when it was loading Windows Form designers. I think it must be due to Syncfusion ( version 7.2.0.20), or its interaction with other add-ons such as Resharper. Just to be sure, I need to have access to the stack trace before it crashed so that I can get the vendors to fix the problem.

Any idea where the exception trace is logged when VS 2008 crashes, or is there anyway I can obtain the stack trace?

P/S: there is this log switch command in devenv command, but from what I learn, it's only logging the activities, not the stack trace.

Answer 1

Start another Visual Studio instance, go to Tools -> Attach to a process, and select the instance that should be debugged here. This will give you the ability to break into the debugger when the problematic instance crashes.

Answer 2

If you'd rather not have another instance of VS running in the background, you can use adplus instead. Just attach it to the VS instance you use for dev, and have it create a full dump in case VS crashes. This way, you won't have any overhead while doing your regular work with VS, and in case it crashes you'll have the full context of the crash.