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Posts Tagged ‘DBH’

How to set breakpoints without source code in Visual Studio 2010

March 8, 2011 7 comments

As usual, I stumble upon a nasty issue while I was writing another post : create a native breakpoint on a function which I don’t have the source code. In Visual Studio 2010. In my case it was on User32.dll!SendMessageW, but you can experience the same difficulty for any other function if you are using symbol files without the path to the source code (as, by instance, public symbols of Microsoft…).

Of course, with WinDbg, nothing (well, almost) could be simpler: just get the name of your function with format <module>!<function name> (if you’re not sure about the name issue a “x <module>!*<part of function name>*” and search into the results), and then type “bu <module>!<function name>“, and you’re done. You can see here that WinDbg was designed to work without source code. It is definitely not the case of Visual Studio. So, how can you achieve this (simple) goal: break on a function without the source code?
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