How can I create objects based on dump file memory in a WinDbg extension?
- by pj4533
I work on a large application, and frequently use WinDbg to diagnose issues based on a DMP file from a customer. I have written a few small extensions for WinDbg that have proved very useful for pulling bits of information out of DMP files. In my extension code I find myself dereferencing c++ class objects in the same way, over and over, by hand. For example:
Address = GetExpression("somemodule!somesymbol");
ReadMemory(Address, &addressOfPtr, sizeof(addressOfPtr), &cb);
// get the actual address
ReadMemory(addressOfObj, &addressOfObj, sizeof(addressOfObj), &cb);
ULONG offset;
ULONG addressOfField;
GetFieldOffset("somemodule!somesymbolclass", "somefield", &offset);
ReadMemory(addressOfObj+offset, &addressOfField, sizeof(addressOfField), &cb);
That works well, but as I have written more extensions, with greater functionality (and accessing more complicated objects in our applications DMP files), I have longed for a better solution. I have access to the source of our own application of course, so I figure there should be a way to copy an object out of a DMP file and use that memory to create an actual object in the debugger extension that I can call functions on (by linking in dlls from our application). This would save me the trouble of pulling things out of the DMP by hand.
Is this even possible? I tried obvious things like creating a new object in the extension, then overwriting it with a big ReadMemory directly from the DMP file. This seemed to put the data in the right fields, but freaked out when I tried to call a function. I figure I am missing something...maybe c++ pulls some vtable funky-ness that I don't know about? My code looks similar to this:
SomeClass* thisClass = SomeClass::New();
ReadMemory(addressOfObj, &(*thisClass), sizeof(*thisClass), &cb);
