Tag Archives: Russinovich

Zoomit

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>0516-160353-Zoomit

As a software developer who does UI, you’ll sometimes need to see exactly what is shown on your screen. You need to see pixels. You need to see pixels in large.

Mark Russinovich has built a tool called Zoomit.exe with which you can zoom into the screen fast.

It’s got these additional features:

  • From Vista on, it does even live zoom.
  • You can draw lines, straight lines, rectangles, ellipses.
  • You can write text.
  • The tool has been built as support for presentations, so it’s got a break function.

Though I use it only for zooming, I like it.

Procdump: Creating Crashdumps Automatically

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Problems:
a) Sometimes, an application crashes on a test computer 😉  And sometimes this occurs immediately at startup, so that you don’t have time to attach windbg before to get a crashdump.

b) Sometimes, an application crashes, and immediately restarts on a test computer. This can be hindering the debugging. E.g. because it would be nice to look at the state of the databases at the time of the crash. And because you would like to have a crashdump.

Solution:
There is a solution for both of these problems. Use the procdump.exe utility of Russinovich. You can attach it to your application immediately at startup and make creating crashdumps automatic.
I use a batchfile procdump.bat with this content:

procdump.exe -e -ma -x %1.exe %1.dmp

Then I open a commandline in the program folder where the app under examination resides (e.g. C:\Program Files (x86)\Xyz\App) and start the batch via

procdump.bat AppNameWithoutDotExe

When the application crashes now, a crashdump is written to the program folder, called AppNameWithoutDotExe_140304_161853.dmp or the like. The numbers contain date and time. At the same time, in the cmd window where you started it, there is written something like “The process has crashed. A dump has been written to …”

Disadvantage:
Procdump is something like a debugger and it attaches itself immediately to the app. Therefore debugging protection is triggered when you start to do something in your app that uses debugging protection.
Then, it may be that the app just silently closes. This is reflected in the cmd window by a line like “The process has exited.”

CPU Monitoring:
Before I forget it, procdump has another feature that may come in handy sometime. It can monitor an application for its CPU load and create a crasdump when the load gets too high.