This training course is a combined and reformatted version of the two previous books Windows Debugging: Practical Foundations and x64 Windows Debugging: Practical Foundations. The new format makes it easy to switch between and compare x86 and x64 versions. The book also has a larger format similar to other training courses from Software Diagnostics Services, punctuation and code highlighting improvements, the output and screenshots from the latest WinDbg 10, and consistently uses WinDbg (X86) for 32-bit examples and WinDbg (X64) for 64-bit examples.

The book contains two separate sets of chapters and corresponding illustrations. They are named Chapter x86.NN and Chapter x64.NN respectively. There is some repetition of content due to the shared nature of x64 and x86 platforms. Both sets of chapters can be read independently. We included x86 chapters because many Windows applications are still 32-bit and executed in 32-bit compatibility mode on x64 Windows systems. This introductory training course can complement the more advanced course Accelerated Disassembly, Reconstruction and Reversing.

The book contains the full transcript of Software Diagnostics Services training. Learn disassembly, execution history reconstruction and binary reversing techniques for better software diagnostics, troubleshooting and debugging on x64 Windows platforms. The course uses a unique and innovative pattern-oriented analysis approach to speed up the learning curve. The training consists of practical step-by-step hands-on exercises using WinDbg and memory dumps. Covered more than 25 ADDR patterns, and many concepts are illustrated with Memory Cell Diagrams. The prerequisites for this training are working knowledge of C and C++ programming languages. Operating system internals and assembly language concepts are explained when necessary. The primary audience for this training is software technical support and escalation engineers who analyze memory dumps from complex software environments and need to go deeper in their analysis of abnormal software structure and behavior. The course is also useful for software engineers, quality assurance and software maintenance engineers who debug software running on diverse computer environments, security researchers, malware and memory forensics analysts who have never used WinDbg for analysis of computer memory. The revised edition uses the latest WinDbg 10 version, has three exercises completely redone with Windows 10 memory dumps, improved formatting, and also includes reprinted memory analysis patterns and techniques from Memory Dump Analysis Anthology referenced in the book.