[update: the conslusion of this debate]
[information on managed mindumps in Visual Studio]
[information on minidumps and Visual Studio; courtesy of the very knowledgeable Andy Pennell, our former dev lead]
[information on windbg]

[update: please pay very close attention to the formats mentioned. We are thinking about cutting an old format, and therefore are asking for people who use this format. We are not cutting a class of functionality from VS, just one format]

Dumps allow you to capture the state of an application for later analysis. Though primarily used for native debugging, I've previously mentioned that they can also be used for managed debugging as well.

It turns out that there are several dump formats:

  • Kernel-mode dumps: These dumps capture information to help you diagnose a problem in the OS, and are much more than the average user needs. Visual Studio does not support this format.
  • Crash dumps: Often generically called "crash dumps," these are generated by windbg with ".dump /f", or Dr. Watson in Windows 2000. Widely used in the past, they have been replaced with the minidump format.
  • Minidumps: The modern dump format. There are many ways to tweak a minidump to meet your needs, but they are all part of the overarching format. If you are generating dumps with Visual Studio or windbg, it is highly likely that you are using minidumps.

We, on the Visual Studio Debugger team, are considering cutting support for reading crash dumps, a legacy format (the second bullet), in Visual Studio 2005. We will keep complete support for minidumps (the third bullet).

Would this affect you? We'd really like to hear from you if so.

 

PS: to be very sure, you can load the dump in question in windbg. It will call a minidump a "User Mini Dump File," and the old style crash dump will be called a "User Dump File." If you are generating the dump with Visual Studio, it is a minidump.