Windows Debugging

Advanced Debugging

Sometimes there are cases where application doesn’t crash with the debugger attached. Or application crashes on a remote device, where debugger is not available. You can still get useful information, if you can get the dump file. Here are simple steps how to do it.

Note: These steps work on Windows Standalone, Windows Store Apps and Windows Universal Apps (when running in Desktop)

• Open the registry.
• Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Error Reporting
• Create LocalDumps folder if it’s not there.
• Add following keys:
  • “DumpFolder”=<FolderPath goes here> , for example, C:\Temp
  • “DumpCount”=dword:00000010
  • “DumpType”=dword:00000002
• Launch the application (it can be anything that runs on Windows - Windows Store App or Windows Standalone Executable)
• Reproduce the crash, the dump file should be created in your specified folder. You can either open the dump file with Visual Studio or WinDbg.