Windbg portable? [closed]

Question

How can we make Windbg portable ?

Scud

I don't understand - from where to where? Another version of Windows? Can't you just download the right version on Windbg? What's the .NET angle - SoS? – Dulciedulcify

It weighs much less than a pound. – Beckwith

Do you mean portable as in you don't need to install it but can run it from for example a memory stick without modifying the installed OS? – Godesberg

Yes, I meant the same. Its the tool I used to troubleshoot production environment problems. Some of my customers have policy of not installing any software on production environments. Hence the ask. – Scud

#3403392 thread lists WinDbg among his portable debug tools. So it seems to be possible. – Godesberg

Answer 1

WinDbg doesn't require any installation. You can run it from an USB stick if you will or just XCOPY deploy it. Microsoft makes sure that WinDbg doesn't require any specific registry settings etc in order to run.

Quote from Microsoft

For as long as I can remember, the windbg programmers have been meticulous in making sure that the installation does not require any registry settings or other COM registration or whatever in order to run.

As for SOS, which is needed to debug managed code using WinDbg, this is part of the .NET framework, so if .NET is present on the machine, so will the correct version of SOS be.

Fun

This was true for the very old (4.x and 6.x) and old (6.x.9xxx and 10.x) versions of WinDbg, but might have changed for the new WinDbg "app" (version 1.2xxx). – Waac

Answer 2

windbg is a proprietary tool made by Microsoft.

We (as a community) can't make is portable, only Microsoft can.

As a windows specific tool, I can't see that it will be easy to port and I can't see any incentive for Microsoft to port it to another OS either.

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Since you clarified that you want to be able to run it off a USB key, rather than have a version for different OSs:

As far as I know, this is not possible.

Jocund

I think you misunderstood the question – Godesberg

@CodeInChaos - I think the question was unclear. I answered to the best of my understanding, before it was clarified further in the comments. – Jocund