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.
Command | Description |
---|---|
.loadby sos mscorwks | Loads the correct version of the SOS(.NET) extension dll based on the version of mscorwks currently loaded |
.chain | View the currently loaded extensions |
.hh command | Opens the help file for the specified command. For example: .hh ~ |
!help | Displays help for extensions, including for SOS a list of commands |
!help command | Displays help for the specified extension command. For example: !help clrstack |
.cls | Clears the sceen |
~ | List all threads |
!threads | List managed threads |
~# s | Set current thread, where # is a thread number, for example: ~3 s |
!clrstack | Display the CLR stack |
!clrstack | Display the CLR stack with parameters |
kb | Display the stack frame for the native thread |
!dso | Dump objects on the stack |
!do | Dump managed object |
dc | Display the contents of memory as DWORDS and ASCII chars |
!dumpheap | Dumps the contents of the managed heap |
!dumpheap -stat | Display stat summary of managed heap |
!dumpmt address | Dumps the MethodTable of the specified address |
!dumpmt -md address | Dumps the MethodTable of the specified address and displays a list of all the methods on the object |
!dumpclass address | Displays the EEClass for the specified address |
!dumpobj address | Display the details of the object at the specified address |
!eestack | Runs !DumpStack on all threads |
!dumpruntimetypes | Displays all System.RuntimeType object from the managed heap |
!runaway | Displays thread time statistics |
.time | Displays System Uptime, Process Uptime, Kernel Time and User Time |
!syncblk | Displays synchronization lock info |
!dumpheap -thinlock | Displays objects locked with thinlocks instead of syncblk’s |
!dumpheap -type System.String -stat | Displays count and total size of the specified type (in this case System.String) on the heap |
!address | Display virtual memory stats, load addresses and reserve/commit info |
!address -summary | Display just the summary virtual memory info |
!eeheap -gc | Display garbage collector generation info |
!pe | Print exception details |
~*kb | Display callstacks for all threads |
!finalizequeue | Display stats and contents of the finalizer queue |