Remeber a few posts ago that I talked about CorDbg, the managed debugger?
According to this post in Mike Stall’s blog (a fine blog, btw) its out of the SDK.
CorDbg was the first managed debugger that was written. It was written in native code since Interop in those days was still being written and was very unstable.
CorDbg also lacks features that are common in WinDbg such as extending it with extensions and instrumeting with it in a nice way.
Its hard (or even impossible according to this at Mike Stall’s blog) to implement a managed debugger in managed code for v1.1 (although I know there are a few people messing around with it as we speak, me included 
). That is why CorDbg is the only viable managed debugger for production debugging for v1.1
To fill all of these gaps and to make things a lot more easier and more powerful here comes MDbg (ta-da).
MDbg is a managed deubugger fully written in C#. Its extendable by writing managed code to extend it, can be used to instrument code and is just so damn cool
It gives you all the things you ever wanted from a production debugger and can also debug both .NET 1.1 and 2.0 code (to use it to debug 1.1 code you will still have to have the .NET 2.0 Runtime installed).
You can find out more information about MDbg here.
I am in the process of collecting some more information for a more elaborate post on MDbg and some of its features (probably a series of posts), so stay tuned.
Entries (RSS)
January 11th, 2007 at 9:23 pm
[...] Felice Pollano is working on merging MDbg (I’ve talked about it before here) with Reflector (the .NET disassembler) so one can debug application without having debug symbols and still be able to get a bit more information than just IL code (you’ll be able to choose the language that will be displayed while debugging) [...]
January 11th, 2007 at 9:33 pm
[...] I talked about MDbg briefly here and even used it to create an small tool to capture and log all exceptions being thrown in the process (even swallowed one) which I titled ExceptionDbg. Its available in both binary and source code and is a nice tool to see all of the exceptions being thrown and caught. It’s also a good reference to implement your own cutomized debuggers and applications based on MDbg. [...]
January 12th, 2007 at 10:51 am
[...] We will be talking about how to do some production debugging at a customer site and how to handle memory dumps for post mortem debugging when you can’t have access to the client’s site. Gadi Meir of Idag (who is leading the session) will also talk about Windows Error Reporting (WER) and how to make your program work with it. I will be talking about the managed areas of production and post mortem debugging as well as some samples on how to use, instrument and extend MDbg (which I talked about quite a bit in previous posts). Mainly these are topics that I’m usually covering here on the blog. [...]