The next chapter is about advanced debugging with tools other than Visual Studio. Most of these tools are available at the Debugging Tools for Windows Web site, which is located at http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/DevTools/Debugging/default.mspx. Windbg, the latest version of Son of Strike (SOS.DLL), and Auto-Dump Plus are three of the most valuable tools available at the Web site.

Windbg is a native and kernel debugger, which is used commonly by software support engineers to diagnose problems and by developers for advanced debugging. It supports live and postmortem debugging. Live debugging is performed by attaching the debugger to a running process. Postmortem analysis is done by examining dumps. With Windbg, you can examine memory, evaluate call stacks, set breakpoints, view thread states, and much more. SOS.DLL is a debugger extension that provides an interface for managed debugging. Son of Strike can be used in Windbg and Visual Studio 2008, as discussed earlier in this chapter.

Mdbg is the new managed debugger. As the dedicated managed debugger, it has capabilities that are not found in either Visual Studio or the Windbg debugger. Mdbg is also introduced in the next chapter.