This article was just updated to include an internal Microsoft tool that is now public. There are many free tools used to troubleshoot and debug software. Below I present a list of the tools that my peers and I use most of the time. Though most of the tools below are free Microsoft tools, not all...

PFE has engineers who specialize in areas which can contain one or more technologies. This species is universally known as D3v PF3 (Developer PFE). Not everyone really knows their habits and role and, as a consequence, sometimes it’s hard for customers to engage them. Their specialty is problem...

1- For reactive incidents: “Bring the engineer onsite because it is going to be easier to isolate the problem.” This is the most common misconception I’ve heard. Let me explain: most complex problems require deep debugging sessions. Collecting the necessary information is the easy...

A reference book for technical support and escalation engineers troubleshooting and debugging complex software issues. The book is also invaluable for software maintenance and development engineers debugging Windows applications and services. Do you want to know more about this book? Check out...

Last October the latest version of the PowerDbg tool was released, version 6.0. This release has major changes. For example, it is now easier to write scripts or otherwise just hack around the debugger, and includes the PowerDbgConsole, a bootstrapper designed to make setting up an interactive PowerDbg...

Whenever I’m debugging with customers watching it’s inevitable: they always ask me what this PSSCOR2.dll extension is. The next question is always if PSSCOR2.DLL is going to be public. PSSCOR2.DLL is a superset of SOS.DLL and has much more commands and variations! The good news is that yes, now PSSCOR2...

Israel Burman (Israel is one of the ADPlus creators and the guy who taught me the XPerf tool) and Mario Hewardt told me I should blog about the XPerf tool. Although I’m new to this tool I decided to follow their suggestions because I believe you’re going to wonder how you could live without using...

This version has a fix in Parse-PowerDbgDSO . Thanks to Igor Dvorkin that found the bug and suggested the fix. DOWNLOAD POWERDBG Download PowerDbg POWERDBG FILES WinDbg.PSM1 ß Starting with this version this is the only file. INSTALLATION WinDbg.PSM1 Goes...

When debugging sooner or later you will need to disassemble code to get a better understanding of that code. By disassembling the code, you get the mnemonics translated from the 0s and 1s that constitute the binary code. It is a low level view of the code, but a higher level than seeing just numbers...

Using WinDbg you can create a dump file from an application running, for instance, in a production server. After collecting the dump file, you can load it in another machine and debug it. However, to be more effective during your debugging session you need symbols . Thus, thinking about it, here's the...

This is one of my favorite commands! !runaway displays information about the CPU time consumed by each thread in User Mode and Kernel Mode. It is one of those commands you run when you think the application is hung with low or high CPU or has some kind of performance issue. Parameters: ...

This script is more a template to show you how to use PowerDbg. I must say the idea is from my teammate Aaron Barth! This script collects information from all threads running managed code and gives the user statistics by threads like: - CLR stack. - Managed objects from the stack. ...

This version has two improvements and some scripts were changed to be compatible with this new version: - Starting on version 5.2 the log used to save the command output, enabling the communication between PowerShell and WinDbg is not used anymore. Now all communication uses memory so it’s faster...

So, here we go again. This is a minor version with a few new cmdlets. These new cmdlets are those that we use most of the time. DOWNLOAD POWERDBG Download PowerDbg POWERDBG FILES WinDbg.PSM1 ß Contains cmdlets used to communicate with WinDbg . Microsoft.PowerShell_Profile...

This is by far one of the most powerful WinDbg commands. Even if you don’t create scripts, you’ll benefit from this command. It’s powerful because it’s flexible. You can use it for a huge variety of operations. The .foreach token parses the output of one or more debugger commands and uses each...

I’m very excited to present the new PowerDbg v5.0! There’s just one change, but it’s a HUGE change that makes PowerDbg extremely fast and easier to use. Let me explain: Send-PowerDbgCommand is the heart of PowerDbg . This is the cmdlet that sends information to WinDbg and retrieves information...

There’s another script that gives you all queries/stored procedures from SQL Server or Oracle that are stored in the managed heap. This script is more specific because it gives you the query/stored procedure running in a specific thread. It has the option to scan all threads and to display the queries...

Here in PFE most of my teammates use the same approach to identify managed objects that “leak”. The idea is to run !DumpHeap –stat once, wait several minutes to allow the “leak” to make itself evident, then run the command a second time. After that you have to select those objects that appear in both...

Good news! Here’s the newest PowerDbg library. This version is more stable and has more features. Let me tell you about them and how to install it. New Features - Send-PowerDbgCTRL-BREAK / Send-PowerDbgResumeExecution If you’re wondering why do you need these cmdlets I can see at least...

This new version has one more parser for !PrintException and a killer feature that my colleagues and myself have wanted since the beginning: PowerDbg, more specifically Send-PowerDbgCommand , which now has the ability to wait until a command finished its execution. It means no more delays to wait for...

It has been a while since my previous blog post. I’ve been busy with other tasks, including the new PowerDbg version 2.3. There’s a lot of new stuff on this new version and my estimate is that about 80% of the most used Windbg commands have been covered so far. J Let me present the new cmdlets...