Software Diagnostics and Observability Institute

Software Diagnostics Services organizes this online training course.

June 4, 11, 18, 25, July 2, 2025 12:30 pm - 1:30 pm (GMT+1) Price 49 USD Registration

This training course is an extended version of the best-selling Practical Foundations of Windows Debugging, Disassembling, Reversing, Second Edition book which drew inspiration from the original lectures we developed more than 20 years ago to train support and escalation engineers in debugging and crash dump analysis of memory dumps from Windows applications, services, and systems. When considering the material to deliver, we realized that a solid understanding of fundamentals, such as pointers, is necessary to analyze stack traces beyond a few WinDbg commands. Therefore, this book was not about bugs or debugging techniques but about the background knowledge everyone needs to start experimenting with WinDbg, learn from practical experience, and read other advanced debugging books. This body of knowledge is what the author of this book possessed before starting memory dump analysis using WinDbg almost 22 years ago, which resulted in the number one debugging bestseller: the multi-volume Memory Dump Analysis Anthology (Diagnomicon). Now, in retrospect, we see these practical foundations as relevant and necessary for beginners, just as they were 20 years ago, because the internals of operating systems, assembly language, and compiler architecture haven't changed significantly in those years.

Although the previous version of the book includes x86 chapters because many 3rd-party Windows applications were still 32-bit and executed in 32-bit compatibility mode on x64 Windows systems at the time of its writing, the new course is entirely x64. If you are still interested in x86, the previous edition is still available and valid.

Please see the previous book's TOC (x64 chapters) for the approximate content.

This new course edition also includes additional relevant CPU instructions, as well as the basics of floating-point and SIMD operations.

Before the training, you get:

• Practical Foundations of Windows Debugging, Disassembling, Reversing, Second Edition PDF book (+300 pages)
• Access to Software Diagnostics Library with more than 440 cross-referenced patterns of memory dump analysis, their classification, and more than 70 case studies

After the training, you also get:

• The new 3rd PDF book edition
• Personalized Certificate of Attendance with unique CID
• Answers to questions during training sessions
• Training sessions recording

Audience:

• Software technical support and escalation engineers
• Software engineers coming from managed code or JVM background
• Software testers
• Engineers coming from non-Wintel environments
• Windows C and C++ software engineers without an assembly language background
• Security researchers without x86/x64 assembly language background
• Beginners learning Windows software reverse engineering techniques

This introductory training course can complement the more advanced Accelerated Disassembly, Reconstruction, and Reversing course. It may also help with advanced exercises in Accelerated Windows Memory Dump Analysis, Accelerated Rust Windows Memory Dump Analysis, Accelerated Windows Debugging⁴, Accelerated Windows API for Software Diagnostics, Accelerated Windows Malware Analysis with Memory Dumps, and Memory Thinking books for C and C++.