Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Switch between Windows debuggers

The key "Debugger" under registry:
\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AeDebug
specifies which debugger will be invoked in case of application unhandled exceptions are thrown.

Usually, if Visual Studio is installed, the default debugger will be Visual Studio JIT Debugger("C:\WINDOWS\system32\vsjitdebugger.exe" -p %ld -e %ld); But if we want to use Dr. Watson(drwtsn32 -p %ld -e %ld -g) to debug (creating log and crash dump), we can set the key name of Dr. Watson to "Debugger" and VS JIT Debugger to something else.