Get stack trace of a crash on Windows without installing Visual Studio? (C++)

Question

I have an C++ application, that crashes on a computer of some person on the other end of the world. There's no way for me to simulate it or get the same computer. The person is no developer, so I cannot really ask him to install Visual Studio or something. I have pretty deep debug logs, but they didn't reveal anything usable.

Is there a tool, that could generate the stack trace of the application at the moment of the crash? Such thing is available inside OSX, but seems that Windows doesn't have it.

Answer 1

You can use procdump. It can be setup as a debugger to automatically create dumps for crashing processes.

Procdump is part of Sysinternal tools and can be found at:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/dd996900.aspx

Relevant switches:

Create a dump for a hung application:

Write a mini dump for a process named 'hang.exe' when one of it's Windows is unresponsive for more than 5 seconds:

C:\>procdump -h hang.exe hungwindow.dmp

Automatically create dumps for crashing apps:

Register as the Just-in-Time (AeDebug) debugger. Makes full dumps in c:\dumps.

C:\>procdump -ma -i c:\dumps

Create a dump for a pid:

 C:\>procdump <PID>

You can read the dump files using windbg: Getting started with dump file analysis