Sunday, October 03, 2010

The Immediate Window: Running WinDbg and SOS (Son of Strike) Commands

I could take a long time to teach you about WinDbg and SOS (Son of Strike) so I will avoid that here.  I want to give you a quick view into how SOS works in the Immediate Window.  If you want to get hardcore with debugging then the absolute best places to learn are these two blogs:
John Robbins over at Wintellect:  http://www.wintellect.com/CS/blogs/jrobbins/default.aspx
Tess Ferrandez an ASP.NET Escalation Engineer at Microsoft:  http://blogs.msdn.com/b/tess/
Loading SOS In The Immediate Window
With that said, let's take a look at what it takes to get SOS going in the Immediate Window.  As we go along I will also show you the most common messages you will encounter when trying to set this up.  First, open the Immediate Window (CTRL + ALT + I) and put in ".load sos" then press ENTER.
x86
You will most likely get this message:
"SOS not available while Managed only debugging.  To load SOS, enable unmanaged debugging in your project properties."
The fix is, obviously, to go to your project properties (the Debug tab):
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Read more: Visual Studio Tips and Tricks