Win Dbg

Win Dbg

WinDbg is a multipurposed debugger for Microsoft Windows, distributed on the web by Microsoft. It can be used to debug user mode applications, drivers, and the operating system itself in kernel mode. It is a GUI application, but has little in common with the more well-known, but less powerful, Visual Studio Debugger.

WinDbg can be used for debugging kernel-mode memory dumps, created after what is commonly called the Blue Screen of Death which occurs when a bug check is issued. It can also be used to debug user-mode crash dumps. This is known as Post-mortem debugging.

WinDbg also has the ability to automatically load debugging symbol files (e.g., PDB files) from a server by matching various criteria (e.g., timestamp, CRC, single or multiprocessor version). This is a very helpful and time saving alternative to creating a symbol tree for a debugging target environment. If a private symbol server is configured, the symbols can be correlated with the source code for the binary. This eases the burden of debugging problems that have various versions of binaries installed on the debugging target by eliminating the need for finding and installing specific symbols version on the debug host. Microsoft has a public symbol server that has most of the public symbols for Windows 2000 and later versions of Windows (including service packs).

Recent versions of WinDbg have been and are being distributed as part of the free Debugging Tools for Windows suite, which shares a common debugging engine between WinDbg and command line debuggers like KD, CDB, and NTSD. This means that most commands will work in all alternative versions without modification, allowing users to use the style of interface with which they are most comfortable.