Advanced Windows Debugging

I have little to add to the effusive praise of previous reviewers. This is a one-of-kind book. An instant classic. Beware, however. As others have noted, this is definitely an _advanced_ book. If you're not comfortable with arcane command syntax, bits and bytes, and such this will be painful to incomprehensible for you. On the other hand, I dare say you will never be a true Master Debugger until you have a good grasp of this material. You would do well to start with Debugging Microsoft .NET 2.0 Applications or the now-unavailable Debugging Applications for Microsoft .NET and Microsoft Windows. Both will give you an easier introduction to WinDbg. The latter, older volume has much more information on native code debugging than the newer version. As they also cover the Visual Studio debugger in detail, most developers need go no further than one of these. Note that WinDbg _can_ be used with SOS and ADPlus to do some pretty fancy .NET debugging that isn't possible with Visual Studio alone. For that matter, the .NET CLR on Windows is implemented using the same Windows API as any native application. I've seen WinDbg used to trace bugs through C# application code down to find that the defect was actually in the CLR or Windows itself. John Robbins (author of the previously mentioned books) states in Chapter 6 of the latest version that "in our consulting work at Wintellect, which as you know works on the toughest bugs, we use WinDBG nearly 70 percent of the time." Don't ignore this book just because you program in .NET! Watch out for the font used in the listings though. Not being a master myself, I've been stumped for quite a while because the letter 'l' looks like the number '1' in the font they use. (I've been assiduously following the examples line-by-line). I also recall being stumped because of an error or two in the text, though I admit I can't find them now. These as you can imagine could be a serious problem given the arcane and undocumented nature of quite a bit of the material. Just make sure you check the errata periodically. Ironically, the errata web page for the book is not functioning at the moment...

Windows debugging tools described in this book are lightweight, freely available, powerful and mature. Microsoft developers have been heavily relying on them for years, on some of the largest-scale software projects ever. Hence the authors' familiarity with the subject. This book is written to be both practical and in-depth. The authors do a very nice job of explaining the underlying Windows OS concepts to show how software defects occur. I think it's quite accessible to an intermediate-level reader. The book is not a collection of tricks and shortcuts: the reader is lead towards a solid understanding of Windows debugging. The shortcuts are thrown in closer to the end of the chapters as a reward. If you are a native-code Windows developer reading this, do your part in making the world a better place: read the book, test your code with application verifier, investigate and fix the failures. You'll rock - thank you in advance! :)

As a technical supervisor, one of the biggest problems I have is training our development teams in the use of the various debugging tools available. I purchased a copy of this book hoping it would help me in that training, and I was not disappointed. This book goes far beyond my expectations and provides insight into not only the use of the various debuggers, explaining how to set breakpoints and analyze memory locations, but it also goes into detail on how to debug some of the more insidious problems common to developers. The chapters on thread synchronization and stack and heap corruptions are excellent and provide invaluable insight into debugging these common problems. But more than that, the book outlines and gives instructions on using some of the lesser known debugging aids, such as the application verifier and the leak diagnosis tool, as well as writing your own debugger extensions. There is a chapter on post-mortem debugging, which goes into detail on using crash dump files, instructions on obtaining information from the Windows reporting service and a chapter on managing symbol and source files. Finally, there are chapters on debugging Vista applications, security problems, and interprocess communications. The authors are clearly masters of debugging windows applications, and this book stands alone in the field. I am a senior C++ engineer with over ten years of experience writing applications for windows and linux, and I found new information in every chapter, all of it easy to understand and well written.

I've been using the Windows Debuggers for a long time now and I found myself an expert and I am regarded as such at my working place where I actively push the use of windbg and friends for trouble solving. This book however shows that even experts can gain a new level of debugging tips and tricks. This is not a one of many books on this topic but one that stands out with head and shoulders. A definately must have for those who do serious debug work, both on kernel and user level debugging!

I could not wait to get a copy of it and so far the book has exceeded my expectations. The book is a great companion to Windows Internals series. The debugging tips and tricks provided are invaluable when doing any serious development of Windows software, including development for x64 and Windows Vista. Debugging is somehow an arcane art, better learned by looking over people's shoulders. Many thanks to the authors for taking time to share their knowledge and fill in an important gap in the technical literature. Right on.