This week I've been teaching DM's Effective .NET course, one theme that run through the course is the ability to debug applications in the field. The tools in your arsenal here are the obvious ones like perfmon, but also the native windows debugging. The native debugger can be used to take snap shots of the suspect process (dump's seems to get a giggle from a few students). You therefore need to put the debugger on the client's machine, the typical way to do this is to download the debugging tools for windows, this is a reasonable size once unzipped 37MB...This includes a graphical debugging a few other bits and bobs, whilst these tools are useful on a developers machine they are not needed to take a snapshot and therefore not relevant for anyone other than a developer. This prompted a question from a student as to what is the minimum set of files needed to take a dump from a users machine.
After a few trial and errors we came up with the following list of files
tlist.exe
dbgeng.dll
dbghelp.dll
adplus.vbs
cdb.exe
This results in a 4.6 MB unzipped install for a client's machine; this is more of a reasonable size that could be included in all employees desktop configuration.
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