AdPlus & WinDbg: difference between taking a dump with AdPlus and with WinDbg?

Question

The task - when the application crashes, it is required to find the crash cause.

I saw recommendations to take the crash dump with AdPlus and then load it into WinDbg for analysis.

What I do is attach WinDbg to a process and wait for the program crash to debug once WinDbg shows the exception.

Is there any advantages in using AdPlus instead of directly attaching WinDbg to the process?

Answer 1

In your case, there's no advantage in creating a dump using AdPlus. If you can attach WinDbg and debug on the target machine, having the complete heap at hand, that's the best you can get.

In general, AdPlus is merely a VB script that wraps CDB, which is a console debugger. When you use it, CDB effectively debugs your program, the same way WinDbg does. The gain you get from using AdPlus is the easy configuration and notification options. Also, since it's designed to create dumps, it does that nicely - creates a per dump folder etc. But that's just convenience - as far as your basic need of finding the bug goes, in your case I'd stick with WinDbg.

Answer 2

I would say ADPlus is only better for non-technical person.

For developers, load process into WinDbg is much more convenient.