microsoft / microsoft/win-dev-skills

[Skill] WinDbg — crash dump & Time Travel Debugging

Open
#128 0 comments 1 reaction 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Dominant language
C#
Stars
442
Forks
33
Avg merge
2h 59m
Merged PRs (30d)
11

Description

Parent: #126

Summary

A guidance skill that teaches an agent how to debug Windows crashes with WinDbg / CDB, including Time Travel Debugging (TTD) traces and post-mortem .dmp analysis — so the agent moves through the problem with less guessing.

What the skill should teach the agent

  • How to load & triage a crash dump (.dmp): find the faulting thread, read the exception record, interpret !analyze -v.
  • Symbol setup (_NT_SYMBOL_PATH, symbol servers) and how to spot wrong symbols.
  • Time Travel Debugging: capture a trace, navigate (!tt, step back), locate first-bad-state.
  • Command cheatsheet with when-to-use notes (k, ~, lm, !teb, !peb, dx).
  • When to hand off to the WinUI runtime error diagnostics skill.

Deliverables

  • Skill (SKILL.md + supporting guidance files) under plugins/.
  • Example walkthroughs (a native crash, a managed/WinRT crash).

Open questions

  • Skill only for now; a live-debugger MCP server is a separate future item.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Read parent #126 first, then inspect the plugin layout and place SKILL.md plus supporting guidance under plugins/. Cover the listed dump, symbol, TTD, command-cheatsheet, handoff, and two walkthrough deliverables; completion means the skill and both native and managed/WinRT examples are present.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Domain
devtools, documentation, operating-systems
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Quiet
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
52/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.