The easy way to get dump files on Windows Vista/Server 2008 and Windows 7/Server 2008 R2
I have finished a Windows Internal course this week at Taldor. Windows Internal is a very special course. Usually when you go to a course, you know what the direct benefit is. You go to C# course; you will learn how to code in C#. You go to WPF, you … got the point. When you take the Windows Internal course, you just become better Windows user, Administrator and Programmer. After the course you have the feeling that you know the system. You know how it is built; you know what's going inside the machine. Teaching the course is also fun; you open the student's eyes. In the last course I told my students that in the Windows XP era it was very easy to get a dump from a buggy process. The dear Dr. Watson was there for us, but bow with Windows Error Report, it is a little bit more complicated. You have to set WER to send the report and Dumps to a share folder… I was totally wrong. Windows Error Report has a registry entry that allows you to set a folder that will have all the dumps, just like Dr. Watson used to do, or even better. You can set the dump type, the maximum dump files and even a settings per application.
This is a global setting that I have added in my machine:
The new GFlags.exe (Part of Debugging Tools for Windows) has a special tab to help you manipulate these settings:
Have a fun debugging!