| Introduction |
DebugView
is a GUI-device driver combination that intercepts and displays
calls made by device drivers to the NTOSKRNL routine DbgPrint under
Windows NT 4.0. Normally a debugger like WinDbg or
SoftICE/NT must be used to capture
this output, but DebugView works with no debugger running, and
can be used to save the DbgPrint log it displays to a file for
later processing. To further aid in debugging, DebugView time-stamps and
marks each line of debug text with a sequence number.
DebugView
is derived from Open Systems Resources's
DebugMon. DebugView does not exhibit bugs present in DebugMon, has output
search capbility, a toolbar and accelerator keys. |
| Installation
and Use |
DebugView
works on all builds of NT 4.0. Installing DebugView is as
easy as unzipping it and typing, "DebugView." The GUI
dynamically loads the driver (based on code from the instdrv sample in
the Windows NT DDK), which starts intercepting DbgPrint calls.
The menus can be used to disable event capturing, control the scrolling
of the listview, and to save the listview contents to an ASCII file.
If DebugView's
internal buffers become exhausted, DbgPrint records will be
intentionally dropped, and this is reflected by a gap in the displayed
sequence numbers.
DebugView
has the option of passing DbgPrint calls on to a
debugger that might also be capturing its output. This can be changed
by setting the Events|Passthrough menu item or toolbar button, which will have
DebugView toggle whether or not it passes debug messages on after they have been
logged. |
