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Article 2645

How To debug a crash using Visual Studio

The following method is recommended if you are unable to reproduce the bug using the advplus tool. The benefit of this method is that the debugger will only be used once the crash happens and unlike advplus which is active as soon as it is started.

1. If you do not have Visual Studio 2010 installed:
   Download and install Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Trial:
   1. Go to http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/download
   2. Download and run the Web setup
   3. In the setup dialog select Customize
   4. Uncheck everything but Visual C++
   5. In the Visual C++ tree node uncheck the Itanium binaries
   6. Continue with the installation
   7. Once the installation has finished and you have rebooted your system, start Visual Studio 2010
   8. At the first start you are prompted to select the default layout/profile:
      Select Visual C++
2. Start SmartFTP
3. A soon as it crashes you will now see a new Debug button in the post mortem crash handler
4. Click Debug
5. In the Visual Studio debugger dialogs select Open new instance
6. Visual Studio starts and will download the symbol files for the system binaries from the Microsoft Symbol Server
7. On the Debug menu, select Save Dump As....
8. Choose where to save the dump file. Select with Heap in the type selection box.
9. Zip/Rar/7z the .dmp file and upload it to a server of your choice (e.g. www.rapidshare.com)
10. Email us the link to file.

Please contact us if you would like these steps to be performed by us. All we require is a remote session to the system (e.g. Windows Remote Desktop, LogMeIn, TeamViewer, etc) for a short time.

Keywords
crash

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