Can WinDBG be made to find mscordacwks.dll in the symbol store?

Question

The Question

There are plenty of manual ways to make WinDBG find mscordacwks.dll without a symbol store (putting the file in the path somewhere, putting it in the same

Answer 1

You have to put the CLR dll and the associated mscordacwks dll in the same folder and register the CLR dll with symstore. In that case symstore will add the clr and the mscordacwks dll on the symbol store.

More importantly, it will use the timestamp and file size of the clr dll to create the mscordacwks subfolder, so windbg can find the mscordacwks dll when debugging a dump.

The mscordacwks name must follow the mscordacwks_ARCH_ARCH_fileversion pattern, otherwise symstore won't add it to the symbol store.

I didn't find any documentation on that feature so it may be removed in the future.

Here is the command and the symstore output:

symstore.exe add /o /f 4.6.1076.00\clr.dll /t clr.dll /s \\mystore\microsoft
SYMSTORE MESSAGE: 0 alternate indexers registered
SYMSTORE MESSAGE: LastId.txt reported id 0
SYMSTORE MESSAGE: History.txt reported id 58228
SYMSTORE MESSAGE: Final id is 0000058228
SYMSTORE MESSAGE: Copying C:\Users\build.robot\symstore\4.6.1076.00\clr.dll to \\mystore\microsoft\clr.dll\56D79ED4990000\clr.dll [Force: T, Compress: F]
SYMSTORE MESSAGE: Copying 4.6.1076.00\mscordacwks_AMD64_AMD64_4.6.1076.00.dll to \\mystore\microsoft\mscordacwks_AMD64_AMD64_4.6.1076.00.dll\56D79ED4990000\mscordacwks_AMD64_AMD64_4.6.1076.00.dll [Force: T, Compress: F]

SYMSTORE: Number of files stored = 2
SYMSTORE: Number of errors = 0
SYMSTORE: Number of files ignored = 0