Throughout the past year our friend Kevin Pintar of Imperva has been kind enough to help us in beta testing our newest XDC feature: dump/XDC. Kevin and his colleagues have been invaluable in helping us test and polish dump/XDC and he had the following to say about the product. 

dump/XDC is a new Licensed Feature that gives z/XDC the ability to examine SYSMDUMPs, IEATDUMPs, SVC dumps, operator dumps and stand alone dumps using z/XDC's command set (not just IPCS's).

Now, you can use both z/XDC and c/XDC mapping and formatting capabilities to display dumped storage as:

• Source image assembler programs,
• Source image C, C++, Metal C and System C programs,
• System and user control blocks and data areas,
• C variables, arrays, structures and slices,
• And object code disassembly.

dump/XDC integrates into IPCS, so you can go back and forth using either product's commands when rummaging around in the dump. z/XDC will capture IPCS's reports and present them to you within z/XDC's own displays.

We recently published a couple of z/XDC updates (DBC-2108C and DBC-2108I) That reorganize all maintenance related topics into a more sensible and more readable structure, and consolidated them into one branch of the Built-in Help. That new branch is named HELP MAINTENANCE.

There also is a new, downloadable PDF named  z/XDC Maintenance and New Functionality Guide. 

And the old z/XDC Release Guide is now retired.

Update DBC-2108A adds T as a new Point-and-Shoot command. This is most useful when placed on the targeting operand of any branching (or jumping) instruction. It sets a temporary breakpoint at the branch's target. So if you have several branch instructions in view, you can easily set traps at all of their targets with a single ENTER press, and without having to actually view those targets first.

If your program needs to know where the XDC load module is, previously, you had to use IBM's LOAD macro which issues an SVC instruction. Now, you can instead use our #XDCLOC8 macro because it finds the XDC load module just by chaining through a couple of system control blocks.

This means that your programs that run in constrained environments that cannot tolerate LOAD macros, can still find XDC by using our #XDCLOC8 macro.

The LIST SUBPOOLS command produces several reports regarding the organization of storage subpools within common storage and within an address space’s private area. We have recently completed a complete rewrite that allows the command to be used both in Foreign Address Space Mode (FASM) and in dump/XDC.

Until now, in order to load/save session profiles, you needed to have a //ISPPROF (or //XDCPROF) allocation in the job (or TSO session ) that you are debugging. Well, when debugging something running in TSO, that’s no problem since //ISPPROF allocations are nearly always present. But in batch jobs, that can be problematic.

z/XDC’s ability to recognize load modules within a CICS address space has been extended. We now support all CICS releases from 4.2 to 5.5.

As some of you have observed, z/XDC has gotten a bit sluggish over the years, and unfortunately, I have to agree. So identifying and correcting significan performance issues has become a priority for us.

z/XDC has a very useful Session Log that it automatically writes to spool. It simply records everything that goes on in the display’s top window (the Working Window). But it never includes anything that occurs in Watch Windows. The problem is, that’s where the PSW and registers are normally displayed.