High Level Shading Language - Practical Rendering and Computation with Direct3D 11 - page 310

Figure 6.1. Shader program usage pipeline.
Shader programs can be debugged using PIX, a debugging and profiling utility in-
cluded with the DirectX SDK. Consult the SDK documentation for additional information
and usage instructions.
6.2.2 Bytecode
Once compilation successfully completes, the compiler outputs to an intermediate for-
mat known as bytecode. This is an opaque binary stream containing all of the assembly
instructions for the shader, as well as embedded reflection and debugging metadata. If a
programmer wants to inspect the resulting assembly instructions for verification, it can
be obtained by using the D3DDisassemble function exported by the D3DCompiler DLL.
The command-line tool f xc. exe will also output the assembly to the command line when