WinDbg 6.3.17 Released

The debugging team has just released the Debugging Tools for Windows version 6.3.17.   There are several new improvements in this release, the most obvious of which is the new UI enhancements which allows you to dock windows, window tabs, and tear window off.  A more complete changelist is also on their website.

I'm a big fan of the new UI.  I recommend setting up your default workspace with the windows setup the way you like them, so that all other projects inherit from them.  In my default workspace, I setup the command window, disassembly, and source code in a big window, in the top left of the WinDbg screen.  Registers and scratch pad are docked together in a thin column along the left side of this large window.  The bottom portion of my screen is split in half.  On the left goes process and threads and the watch window.  The bottom right gets calls and locals.

If you're at all a fan of WinDBG I recommend grabbing this update.

Comments

• Anonymous
  June 04, 2004
  
  I note with irony that such changes happen now when everybody else is evangelizing managed code. Makes you wonder if there are first-class developers using full-control tools, and then everybody else using whatever latest trendy tool.
  
  
• Anonymous
  June 07, 2004
  Hi Stephane,
  
  As a member of the CLR team, I certainly do believe that managed code is the future :-) And you can tell that Microsoft does too, since large portions of major products, such as SQL Server and Longhorn will rely on the CLR to do their work. However the whole world's not on managed code just yet, and there are times when you'll have to debug native code. For instance, when using COM interop, or P/Invoke. Or maybe you have to do some bug fixing on a product your company wrote in unmanaged code. Or add some new features to it. WinDBG also does kernel mode debugging, so device driver writers can use it.
  
  Also, don't forget that you can use WinDBG + SOS.dll to do managed debugging. SOS is actively under development so you can expect that the managed debugging experience will get even better with the release of Whidbey. In fact, I use WinDBG all the time to debug managed code. I don't think that it's at all a full control tool made available only for "non full-control" users.
  
  -Shawn