Debug Psi on Windows

From PsiWiki

TODO: include http://psi-im.org/forum/thread/3183

Viewing debug messages without a debugger

you can see the debug messages from psi with this tool: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/Miscellaneous/DebugView.mspx

Using debugger on Psi

1. Run Psi.
2. Start Your debugger.
3. Attach Your debugger to Psi process:

   Visual Studio 6

   Build|Start debug|Attach to process...

   Select psi. Note that only visible windows may be listed.

   Visual Studio .NET and .NET 2003

   Debug|Process

   Select psi.exe. Make sure only Native domain is selected.

TODO: (michalj) Finish this, test on Visual 6 and .NET 2003. Make sure how to point to sources. What about PDB file?

Using Dr. Watson

More info on Dr. Watson can be found here and here.

If you want to send a crash report check you have drwatson installed, and that it creates log and dump files correctly. These dump files are placed in "C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Dr Watson". The dump files (and the logs file) contain useful stack traces, and debugging info that we can use to help track down the bug.

Once you have the crash dump file from Dr. Watson you can open it in Visual Studio (as a Project). To load the dump into debugging mode after you have opened it, choose Debug|Start, or press F5. If you place the source code in the same folder it was compile from (this may vary between different builds), then you can even see which code was being executed at the time of the crash.

Useful windows to look at under Debug|Windows include: Call Stack (Ctrl+Alt+C) and the Watch windows - Locals (Ctrl+Alt+V,L) and Auto (Ctrl+Alt+V,A)