Use Debugging Tools for Windows to debug drivers, applications, and services on Windows systems. The core debugging engine in the tool set is called the Windows debugger. Starting with Windows 8, you can use Visual Studio as your interface to the Windows debugger. You can also use the traditional interfaces (WinDbg, CDB, and NTSD), which are included in Debugging Tools for Windows.
Getting Started with Debugging Tools for Windows
Installing Debugging Tools for Windows
Debugger How-Tos
- Advanced Driver Debugging: Part 1 [media file]
- Advanced Driver Debugging: Part 2 [media file]
- Avoiding debugger searches for unneeded symbols
- Debugging Kernel-Mode Driver Framework Drivers
- Debugging WDF Drivers
- How to Enable Verbose Debug Tracing in Various Drivers and Subsystems
- Debugging a Driver
- BCDEdit /dbgsettings
- Tools for Debugging Drivers (WDK Documentation)
Knowledge base articles for debugging
A number of Knowledge Base articles are available for debugging related topics. This page provides a few examples of Product Support links that are relevant for debugging.
- 2816225: Enabling Debug mode causes Windows to hang if no Debugger is connected
- 311503: Use the Microsoft Symbol Server to obtain debug symbol files
- Q248413: INFO: NDIS Kernel Debugger Extensions
- Q121366: INFO: PDB and DBG Files - What They Are and How They Work
- Q121543: Setting Up for Remote Debugging
- Q129845: Blue Screen Preparation Before Calling Microsoft
- Q128372: How to Remove Symbols from Device Drivers
- Q97858: CTRL+C Exception Handling Under WinDbg
- Q102351: Debugging Console Apps Using Redirection
- Q117559: INF: How to Correlate Spid, Kpid, and Thread Instance
- Q121434: Specifying the Debugger for Unhandled User Mode Exceptions
- Q133722: HOWTO: Debug Flat Thunks
- Q148220: PRB: Debugger Reports "WARNING: symbols checksum is wrong"
- Q137199: PRB: Debuggers Cannot Reliably Use Debug Register Breakpoints
- Q100957: PRB: Debugging an Application Driven by MS-TEST
- Q130667: PRB: F12 Causes Hard-Coded Breakpoint Exception When Debugging
- Q173260: PRB: Synchronization Failure When Debugging
- Q168609: How to Use Display Heap (DH.EXE) Utility
- Q103861: INFO: Choosing the Debugger That the System Will Spawn
Related topics
Driver Developer Community Resources
Driver Signing Requirements for Windows