Learning to debug - Part 1

So, I'm trying to hook up the Mozilla Symbol Server in order to better see how my attempts at knitting a source server to it will work.

First - I need to know what version of Firefox I should be doing this with. Currently I have 3 options: ff2, nightly build and my own build from yesterday's class. Talking with Dave on IRC, it seems like the nightly is the one to go with.

Now I need a sure-fire browser crashing bug. A few attempts at finding simple-seeming bugs in mxr is fruitless. I try a Gmail bug, the printer bug - no crash. Then bsmedberg provides me with this.

So, with my visual studio 2005 attached to the process that is Minefield, I install the toxic extension and restart Minefield - "Crash Bang Boom!" (i love this, btw). So now I can see some stuff in Visual Studio. What I'm looking at, I'm not exactly sure yet.

Then I did something and cleared out the results of the crash and now I can't get them back because Minefield crashes too fast for me to attach to process in VStudio. Bsmedberg gave me the following commands to try and get it back:
set env NO_EM_RESTART=1
devenv -debugexe firefox.exe -P test

I'm fiddling with this as we speak.

Stay tuned for part 2 where I hopefully will start to see the use of symbols.