Capturing Dump Using Windbg

Copy this script and save as .reg file. Dump files will be saved in c:\dump folder.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AeDebug]
"Auto"="1"
"UserDebuggerHotKey"=dword:00000000
"Debugger"="\"c:\\Program Files\\Debugging Tools for Windows (x86)\\windbg.exe\" -p %ld -e %ld -g -Q -c \".dump /mfhtpu /u c:\\dump.dmp;q\""

Links for FCMDA-materials

http://www.dumpanalysis.com/FCMDA-materials
http://www.dumpanalysis.com/FCMDA-materials-Rev2

Visual Studio: How to: Debug in Mixed Mode

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/kbaht4dh(v=vs.80).aspx

!htrace: The difference between the two snapshot is too large

Click on Debug > Break (or just CTRL+Break)

Type “!htrace –diff” without the quotation marks and then press Enter.

Note: By default, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 keep a history of 4000 handles open and close operations.
With !htrace you can enable to keep a much higher history by doing the following:

Type “!htrace –enable 0x20000” without the quotation marks and then press Enter.
In this example, we are increasing the handle history to 128000 (decimal, 0x20000 hexadecimal).


Link:- http://blogs.technet.com/b/yongrhee/archive/2011/12/19/how-to-troubleshoot-a-handle-leak.aspx

MSIL tutorials

The following is some useful links to MSIL tutorials.

• Introduction to MSIL by Kenny Kerr
• ILDASM is Your New Best Friend by John Robbins
• MSIL Tutorial by Alex F

Windows 7 No Longer Supports Full Memory Dumps??

A new registry value has been added that will override this behavior and always cause the crash dump file to be generated. By setting the \HKLM\System\CCS\Control\CrashControl\AlwaysKeepMemoryDump DWORD value to 1 you will guarantee that you will always have a crash dump file after crashing the system.

For details fo though this:- http://www.osronline.com/article.cfm?article=545

Debugging Focus Bugs

1. Jeffrey Richter wrote an article in 1997 which contains a tool for finding the focus among other things: http://www.microsoft.com/msj/0397/Win32/Win320397.aspx
2. We can use SPY++ and analyze messages
3. We can do Remote Debugging and Multi-Monitor.
4. The Inspect tool, part of the Windows SDK download, can be useful here. It's designed to test out the two Accessibility-related APIs - MSAA and UI Automation - and one of the things that both those APIs to is allow accessibility and test tools to track the focus.
   The simplest way to use it for tracking focus is to put it into MSAA mode, check the options to follow only focus changes (ie. turn off following the mouse pointer), then turn on the yellow highlight rectangle. Now as focus changes, you can see the rectangle move. As a bonus, if focus goes to something that's hidden or offscreen, you won't see a rectangle, but the name and Win32 class of the control will be displayed in the window.
   Note that Inspect shows a superset of focus events: you get not just HWND focus changes, but also notifications when focus moves within certain controls - such as between items in a list box. Automated test and accessibility need these, but for your purposes you should be ok to just ignore these; it's extra information, but shouldn't get in the way too much.
5. Win32 Activation and Focus :- http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jfoscoding/archive/2006/08/02/686141.aspx