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Asked: 2026-06-17T12:13:58+00:00

Question: Can I set up VS2010 so it automatically writes debug output to a

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Question: Can I set up VS2010 so it automatically writes debug output to a file?

Motivation: I have a DirectX 9 application that I’m trying to debug. I’ve noticed that when my application is fullscreen, it may crash under certain conditions. Normally I would just check my logs or DirectX debug output. However, the way my program crashes prevents that. It freezes and does not respond to any my attempts to end it (including “End Process” from task manager). Moreover, it also freezes my VS2010, and so VS doesn’t respond to any commands either. The only way out of this whole thing that I’ve found is to End VS process. This, however, also destroys the output I’d very much like to read.

Now I see two ways out of this. First is to write all the debug info to a file but I have no idea how to do it. Second is to make my application crash in a more friendly way, but this seems like a difficult task.

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  1. Editorial Team

    Probably MiniDumpWriteMiniDump(..) helps on this. You can at any time dump the current state of the process to a file. After that, you can open the dumps with Visual Studio and analyze the state of the process – this includes callstacks of every thread, variable values…

    Try to identify conditions in which your process crashes and write one or more dumps.

    Another try is to install the Windows Debugging Tools and use WinDbg to debug your application. This is not as comfortable as Visual Studio, but allows a deeper insight.

    Edit:
    If there are debug statements made with OutputDebugString(..), you can use DebugView (from Microsoft, earlier Sysinternals) to display it.

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