Microsoft announces Time Travel Debugging (TTD) features for the new WinDbg debugger tool

Back in August, Microsoft released a preview version of a brand new WinDbg debugger tool for Windows developers. It was a major update with lots of new features and modern visuals. Today, Microsoft announced the availability of Time Travel Debugging (TTD) features in the latest update of WinDbg Preview.

Time Travel Debugging is a reverse debugging process for developers that will allow them to?record?the execution of an app or process, replay it both forwards?and backwards and use queries to search through the entire trace.?Most of the debuggers in the market allow developers to only go forward from a specific time. But TTD allows developers to go back in time to better understand the conditions to identify the bug. Here’s how it works,

1. Record: Record the app or process on the machine which can reproduce the bug. This creates a Trace file (.RUN extension) which has all of the information to reproduce the bug.
2. Replay: Open the Trace file in WinDbg Preview and replay the code execution both forward and backward as many times as necessary to understand the problem.
3. Analyze: Run queries & commands to identify common code issues and have full access to memory and locals to understand what is going on.

Learn more about this new feature here.