Question

With visual studio you can attach to a running process, hit ‘pause’ (or called break), and even without symbol files or source, you’ve paused the process and can see a disassembled view.

I would like to achieve this but at the very start of the process. Attaching and pausing as quickly as possible is not the solution I’m looking for 🙂

For example, if the application was a console based c++ app, gdb can set a break point on main() [or any named function it can find for that matter]. Can something similar be done with visual studio?

But this question is for the more general case – I’d like to be able to start a process and have it pause immediately upon entry (immediately after the kernel launches the process).

Answer 1

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/greggm/archive/2008/09/12/attaching-a-debugger-at-startup.aspx

There are some level of support. But if I were you, I would use WinDbg directly.