Tag: WinDbg

A new (and old) Reverse Debugger – Microsoft WinDbg

A blog post from Undo Software informed me that Microsoft has rather quietly released a reverse debugger tool for Windows programs – WinDbg with Time Travel Debug. It is available in the latest preview of WinDbg, as available through the Windows Store, for the most recent Windows 10 versions (Anniversary update or later). According to a CPPcon talk about the tool (Youtube recording of the talk) the technology has a decade-long history internally at Microsoft, but is only now being released to the public after a few years of development. So it is a new old thing 🙂

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Reverse History Part Three – Products

In this final part of my series on the history of reverse debugging I will look at the products that launched around the mid-2000s and that finally made reverse debugging available in a commercially packaged product and not just research prototypes. Part one of this series provided a background on the technology and part two discussed various research papers on the topic going back to the early 1970s. The first commercial product featuring reverse debugging was launched in 2003, and then there have been a steady trickle of new products up until today.

Originally published in January 2012. Post updated 2012-09-28 with a revised timeline for Lauterbach CTS. Post updated 2016-04-05 to include Mozilla RR. Post updated 2016-12-26 to add Simulics. Post updated 2017-10-08 to add Microsoft WinDbg. Post updated 2018-07-28 to add Borland Turbo Debugger.

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Reverse History Part Two – Research

This is the second post in my series on the history of reverse execution, covering various early research papers. It is clear that reverse debugging has been considered a good idea for a very long time. Sadly though, not a practical one (at the time). The idea is too obvious to be considered new. Here are some of the papers that I have found, going back before reverse debugging got started for real in actual products (around 2003) as well later on for interesting research papers that did not make it into products.  It is worth noting that products/useful software has become more common in recent times as the way that reverse debugging ideas get expressed.

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