Hello!

Hi Everyone!

My name is Andy Luhrs, and I'm one of the Program Managers on Debugging Tools for Windows. Our team has decided to start up a blog to get some more tips and tutorials out to people around updates and changes to our debugging tools (WinDbg, kernel debugging, AppVerifier, etc.) There's tons of blogs about debugging difficult or weird issues (Raymond's is my favorite), and the main goal of this isn't to cover that type of stuff. The plan is to have a few people across our team contribute, so expect to see a variety of perspectives. We're largely aiming to look at and highlight some of the under the hood type changes that doesn't fit in our normal MSDN documentation, and talk about features in the preview releases of the SDK that don't have full documentation written for them yet. We'll do our best to update our blog posts to point to official documentation when it's available.

So here's a few quick tips to get started:

  1. Stay up to date! We make a lot of changes behind the curtains that improve command performance, reliability, and output. It's definitely worth staying on the SDK preview versions of WinDbg when they're available.
  2. Try running 'dx Debugger' and click around the DML links and learn what's the in the namespaces there. We'll be going a bit more in-depth on what's possible with 'dx' and what some of the more interesting namespaces are in future posts. Or even better, try 'dx -r3 @$cursession.Devices.DeviceTree' while in a kernel session.
  3. If you're using something like a laptop or Surface, you might hate that it doesn't have a "Break" key. We added Alt+Delete as an alternative key combination to break-in.

We're aiming to make posts with every SDK preview release that has major changes, when we have a question that gets asked frequently, and when we have good tutorials or tips that we want to share out. Feel free to use comments to ask for elaboration or details, and we'll do our best to follow-up.

 

-Andy Luhrs

@aluhrs13

Comments

  • Anonymous
    August 11, 2016
    Hello!0: kd> dx -r1 @$cursession.Devices.@"DeviceTree"@$cursession.Devices.@"DeviceTree" : Error 0x80004005 occurred.
    • Anonymous
      August 11, 2016
      There was a typo in the original post, the actual command is "dx -r3 @$cursession.Devices.DeviceTree", but that typo wouldn't give you that error. What version of the debugger are you using?
      • Anonymous
        August 12, 2016
        The comment has been removed
        • Anonymous
          August 12, 2016
          You're using a debugger that's a bit over a year old. Installing the most recent SDK should fix your issue, you can find it at https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkID=822845
          • Anonymous
            October 06, 2016
            Hello!Doesn't help.0: kd> version...Microsoft (R) Windows Debugger Version 10.0.14321.1024 X86....0: kd> dx -r3 @$cursession.Devices.DeviceTree@$cursession.Devices.DeviceTree The error disappeared, but the command output is empty.
  • Anonymous
    August 11, 2016
    Hi, looking forward to your upcoming posts.One question I have is how developers will be able to obtain checked OS builds of current releases... any word on that?
  • Anonymous
    August 16, 2016
    Andy, I am seeing a problem with the new build 14901. The Miracast drivers are missing or the ability to use wifi to connect to TVs is missing. Do you have a work around for this??
  • Anonymous
    September 26, 2016
    Andy,I just commented on your episode in Channel9's Defrag Tools. It is not directly related to your team, but if you could give a brief overview to get started on LINQ & Natvis, it will be great!Hope this blog will be great like other great blogs out there! Good luck!
  • Anonymous
    September 27, 2016
    Welcome to the blogging world. I just watched you guys on Defrag Tools and found out about this blog.I use WinDbg almost daily in my work, so I'm sure you're blog will be most useful to me.It was never easy following the scattered crumbs of information from the Debugger Tools team, so it'll be great to have direct communication here.Looking forward to upcoming posts.
  • Anonymous
    November 16, 2016
    Looking forward for most articles!!