Getting Started with WinDbg

I discovered WinDbg about a year ago and have found it to be the most powerful and complete debugger available for Windows PCs. Unfortunately, it can be a very intimidating debugger since most of the work is done via text commands. I'm going to use this blog entry as a place to dump most of my learnings about WinDbg. It will be updated quite often until I feel I've documented enough to use this as a reference to teach someone how to use it.

Setting WinDbg as the default Just-In-Time (JIT) Debugger

From the command line, run:
C:\> cd C:\Program Files\Debugging Tools for Windows
C:\Program Files\Debugging Tools for Windows> WinDbg -I

Adding Microsoft Symbol Server to the Symbols Path

Launch WinDbg, then go to File>Symbol File Path and add SRV*C:\Windows\Symbols*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols to the paths.

When you exit WinDbg, it will ask you if you wish to save changes for Workspace Base. You must select YES or it will not save your symbol path.