How To: Windows Crash Dumps

Developer VST 3 SDK
#1

Hey All,

This is slightly OT but I think useful information for anyone developing plugins on Windows.

Fairly regularly I receive crash reports indicating problems with a plugin. Often I’ll end up forwarding the crash dump to the plugin’s developer but too often I get the impression they haven’t archived the appropriate PDB files etc… to be able to make sense of it.

So I wrote an article explaining how all this works. It’s almost trivial to setup but it needs to be done at build time - not later when the crash report comes in. A couple of simple steps now makes working with crash reports later so much easier…

https://blog.cantabilesoftware.com/visual-studio-crash-dumps---a-guide-for-plugin-developers-5b2a666d94e2/

I hope someone finds this useful (and let me know if I’ve missed anything).

Brad

1 Like
#2

… excellent article. Let’s change your entry to an sticky!

Thank you,
Michael.

#3

FYI: 404 Page Not Found.

#4

Sorry about the broken link. Fixed now.

#5

There is a Michael on Facebook who says our plugin would crash Cantabile.
However, I’ve tried it an it runs fine. Would you mind trying it, it is a free download.

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#6

Hi Max, I just tried it here in the latest build and build 3669 of Cantabile and it seems to work fine. If you want to ask them to send a crash report and ping me via email I can check it out and forward to you if you like. Brad

#7

I’ve had the same issue. Following this thread.

#8

Hi Brad, thank you for testing, much appreciated. Turns out the user has a processor without support for AVX instructions. We either need to compile it without AVX and live with the performance hit or somehow make the installer check for AVX and alert the user.