Son of Strike Debugging Inside Visual Studio .NET

In his June ’03 Bugslayer column, John Robbins made a sideways comment when discussing Son of Strike (SOS), a debugging extension from Microsoft for doing all kinds of low-level, mixed native and managed code debugging.

What Jon said was this: “Interestingly, starting with Visual Studio® .NET 2003, you can load SOS when doing mixed-mode debugging.” And then he didn’t say how to load SOS into VS.NET, even after spending the rest of the article telling us how cool SOS was.

Luckily, Mike Stanton, an SDE on the CLR team, has created a set of instructions for loading SOS into VS.NET. Actually, he posted those instructions in December of last year, but it wasn’t ’til today that they were accurate because it wasn’t ’til today that I tried them and couldn’t get them to work. Now they are and I can and I have all kinds of low-level goodness to explore with Son of Strike.