Author Topic: integrating with WinDBG  (Read 9803 times)

abushnell

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integrating with WinDBG
« on: November 06, 2008, 02:36:43 PM »
I am curious to hear about any success or lack thereof, with setting up Visual Slickedit projects/workspaces to debug using Windbg. Any luck in spawning it and/or being able to set breakpoints in vslick and pass that information along?

drac

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Re: integrating with WinDBG
« Reply #1 on: January 05, 2009, 03:53:31 PM »
You can read here that Slickedit doesn't have support for "Native debugging".

Debugging Tools For Windows comes with a command line debugger (cdb.exe) just like GNU Debugger (gdb.exe), this should be relatively easy for Slickedit guys to support.

Code::Blocks IDE has support for cdb. Other opensource IDE's (Eclipse CDT, Ultimate++) have already native debugging support, the SlickEdit engineers can have a look and implement this feature!

I guess one can make a gdb wrapper over cdb and it would work without any changes in Slickedit! That's in theory!

I suppose SlickEdit has to make extensive testing and that's why they don't have support for native debugging, otherwise they are missing a great opportunity, with all the native developers frustrated by the slowness of the managed code IDEs.

glimt

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Re: integrating with WinDBG
« Reply #2 on: January 08, 2009, 06:40:33 PM »
It would be great if there was a way to debug Visual C++ builds inside of SlickEdit.. a la Native Debugging.  Flipping out to DevStudio works, but is kinda clumsy and I have to admit that every time I do it I briefly consider dropping SlickEdit and switching to Visual Studio full-time.  CDB seems like a *real* solution to this that would be very easy to support.


Wanderer

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Re: integrating with WinDBG
« Reply #3 on: January 08, 2009, 11:57:31 PM »
I'm going to offer a contrary opinion:  I don't want the SlickEdit guys to spend a second on integrating Windows debugging in to SlickEdit.  I use Visual Studio (since at least VS 2003) and find it to be a very powerful and useful debugger.  I don't expect or want SlickEdit to be an IDE competing with Visual Studio.

I have no trouble switching back and forth, since I use SlickEdit for writing and understanding code, and VS for debugging.  Two tasks, two tools.  (I also have a dll, originally written by Gary Ash, that allows me to set VS breakpoints from SlickEdit, start the VS debugger from SlickEdit, and a few other things.  Adding SlickEdit as an external tool on the VS Tools menu makes it simple to go from VS to the same file/line in SlickEdit.)

Rather than integrate a whole 'nother tool (a debugger) in to SlickEdit, I would prefer the SlickEdit team improve code visualization/navigation features.  Call trees, #include hierarchies, better navigation with overloaded functions, better support for COM programming, etc.

What's next?  Calls for a GUI composition capability in SlickEdit?

lambertia

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Re: integrating with WinDBG
« Reply #4 on: January 09, 2009, 01:05:53 AM »
Hi All.

I almost hate to say this, but visual studio is the best debugger I've ever used. As an editor and code browser it is abysmal, but as a debugger it is excellent. There is no comparison between VS and SE/GDB when it comes to debugging.

Cheers,
--
Greg.


ScottW, VP of Dev

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Re: integrating with WinDBG
« Reply #5 on: January 19, 2009, 04:13:46 PM »
Good feedback, but I hope this illustrates how difficult it is to figure out what to build. We have looked into integrating WinDBG because we have had several requests for it. That is not a planned feature for v14, but could be part of v15.

We'll be sure to support those who prefer to debug in Visual Studio as well.