microsoft / microsoft/win-dev-skills
[Skill] WinDbg — crash dump & Time Travel Debugging
Open
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
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- 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