Resource Page Description
A sample debug engine for Visual Studio. This engine will debug native win32 applications. It supports attaching to processes, launching new processes, basic breakpoints, basic callstacks, basic properties (locals and parameters), trace output, module and thread enumeration. It does not support stepping or the many advanced debugging features (such as conditional breakpoints, or tracepoints). It does, however, demonstrate a lot of the requirements for creating a debug engine. The engine demonstrates the implementation and use of the AD7 interfaces which are the bridge between the debugger's UI and each debug engine. AD7 is documented here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb147088.aspx.
A custom debug engine is required when adding debugging support for a new platform technology into Visual Studio. .Net language implementers should implement an Expression Evaluator instead which integrates into the existing .Net debug engine and extends it with language specific features.
There are several walkthrough documents available for download as well. The first one explains the basic architecture of the engine and has a guided walkthrough of project launch. The second walks through module load and thread create. The third one walks through breakpoint binding and stopping events.
My blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/jacdavis) has several articles about this sample, about Visual Studio Debug Engines and about more advanced debugging topics. Other team member blogs include Gregg (http://blogs.msdn.com/greggm) and Jim (http://blogs.msdn.com/jimgries).
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