From time to time I’m dragged into the murky world of Microsoft to debug a problem a customer is having, or to setup the occasional small business server.
My Windows skills are passable, but certainly nowhere near as good as my Linux capabilities – simple stuff like doing an strace on linux becomes a “ummmmm how?” on Windows.
Recently had an issue with an old Windows application refusing to launch on Windows Server 2008 due to a missing DLL file – found a very handy application published by Microsoft that works on XP SP2+ called “Process Monitor”.
It shows all calls being made by programs including what DLLs are being called and what registry values are being queried, along with the response from all these calls.
In my case, I was able to see what DLL file the problem was requesting and seeing that the OS was returning a NOT FOUND response – installed the require library, and fixed. :-)
Download from: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645
As a side note, MS have a lot of other cool utilities as part of their sysinternals suite:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb545027
Process Monitor?
Please. Real men hackers use Process HACKER: http://processhacker.sourceforge.net/
Real men use Linux! ;-)
Wow, Process Hacker is awesome. I just solved (in less than 10 minutes!!) two different performance mysteries that had been plaguing one particular machine for about a year! :)