Recently, we ended up with problems with a program that writes a report from the model, but the problem only occurs on the model server, .  The error messages were nice and descriptive…

This is the primary error shown on the screen. I can assure you that nothing in the lower text area (that can be scrolled) indicates what the error actually was.

This is only slightly helpful.

Enter the .Windows Debugger, windbg.

On the server (where this program was running), we had the executable file, the PDB file (which is built with the executable), and the source code (which I don’t think was used).

We opened the debugger and used it to open the executable file.

The commands generally went like this:

.sympath+ C:\Modelrun\Model81\
.srcpath C:\Temp\ModelReport76\ModelReport76
(debug menu - resolve unqualified symbols)
.reload
x ModelReport76!*
g
!analyze -v

The first two lines set the symbol path to the PDB file and to the source.  The x ModelReport76!* loaded some program stuff into memory.  ‘g’ tells the debugger to run the program.  !analyze -v dumps an analysis to the screen.

The analysis didn’t really tell us anything, but what did was what ended up on the actual program window:

Note the source code filename and the line…

On that particular line of the source code, the program is attempting to create an Excel sheet.  The model server does not have Excel/Microsoft Office, so that’s likely the problem.

Posted on Monday, November 14th, 2016 By Andrew Rohne Comments are closed.