I was encountering a rather irritating bug a couple of days ago that only manifested itself when built via the native toolchain in release mode. I couldn't get it to manifest itself when running from Visual Studio for some reason and the problem occurred so early in the app's lifecycle that I didn't have time to create a minidump of the process.

Luckily, after some reading I learned that you could connect WinDbg directly to a UWP app via the plmPackage and plmApp parameters but this was kind of cumbersome - especially when debugging different versions and architecture of the package - so I decided to write a little PowerShell script to automate starting of the debugging session.

# Replace this value with the application ID that you 
# find in the applications Package.appxmanifest file. 
$AppName = "App"

# Get the package.
$Package = Get-AppxPackage -Name "MyPublisher.MyCoolPackage";
if($null -eq $Package) {
    throw "Could not find package!";
}

# Launch WinDbg
$WinDebugPath = "C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\Debuggers\$($Package.Architecture)\windbg.exe";
&$WinDebugPath -plmPackage $Package.PackageFullName -plmApp $AppName

Please note that you need to have Windows Driver Kit installed for this to work.

Happy debugging!