I had previously blogged about finding some good tutorials on how to get started. I’ve been using the WinDBG debugger a little bit more lately and I’ve put together a “cheat sheet” that I use for the most common commands and I thought I would share them. Almost all of these commands are specific to the SOS extension to debug .NET code.

If you are a seasoned WinDBG user, you’ll know all of these command by heart, but if you are just getting started this might help. The first thing to do is run, don’t walk to setup your “Symbol Search Path” setting. Enter CTRL+S from inside WinDBG, mine looks like this:

You can find out more about it in this Microsoft support article.

The WinDBG command line has TAB completion, so when you type the first few characters of a command, hit TAB to cycle through the possible completions.

I have picked up the majority of these tips by reading some of the great blogs on MSDN. If you are interested in learning a lot more about WinDBG and how to debug some very difficult problems you need to subscribe to Tess’s blog right away!

If you know of any other tips or helpful WinDBG command, please post them in the comments and I’ll add them to the list.

If you develop with ASP.NET you need to subscribe to Scott Guthrie’s blog.

His blog is full of detailed and well written articles that provide invaluable insight to any ASP.NET programmer.

He just posted the PowerPoint presentation and the sample code from his TechEd talk. I would highly recommend you download and review the sample project. I know every time I download samples that Scott has posted I learn something new.

Some of the features shown:

• app_offline.htm
• cross page postbacks
• maintaining scrollback position
• default button
• custom databinding expressions

If you develop with ASP.NET you need to subscribe to Scott Guthrie’s blog.

His blog is full of detailed and well written articles that provide invaluable insight to any ASP.NET programmer.

He just posted the PowerPoint presentation and the sample code from his TechEd talk. I would highly recommend you download and review the sample project. I know every time I download samples that Scott has posted I learn something new.

Some of the features shown:

• app_offline.htm
• cross page postbacks
• maintaining scrollback position
• default button
• custom databinding expressions

If you have never used WinDBG or the SOS extensions before, read the following blog posts by Mike Taulty:

• A word for WinDBG – Part 1
• A word for WinDBG – Part 2

Mike walks you through a sample debugging session with WinDBG. Then in the second part, he focuses on the SOS extensions for .NET debugging. With the SOS extension you can do some seriously cool stuff:

• View thread/threadpool info
• View the finalizequeue
• See what’s allocated on the managed heap
• Determine what is keeping your managed object from being finalized by viewing it’s “roots”

If you have Visual C++ installed you can actually use SOS calls from the Visual Studio debugger! Read Mike’s post, that walks you through the setup and use of SOS from inside Visual Studio. As Mike points out, make sure you go to the project properties, choose Debug, and then check “Enabled unmanaged code debugging”. Be prepared the very first time you do this, it might be slow because the symbols have to be downloaded/loaded.