Some Spelunking Help

By Mike Gunderloy Sunday, February 02, 2003 For those of us who work mostly at the application level, the internals of Windows can be one big confusing ball of memory addresses and API calls. Still, sometimes it's fun (or at least interesting) to take a look down into that stuff. I happened to run across a new set of tools for this sort of thing recently, including TopToBottomNT. When you fire up the tool, it shows you all the running processes on the machine. You can double-click a process to get more information about it in an MDI window. This lets you see everything from who started it to which libraries and APIs it's importing. You know, sometimes it's scary just how complex a structure we're building on. Mike Gunderloy is the lead developer for Larkware and author of numerous books and articles on programming topics.

This is just one of a pile of system utilities from SmidgeonSoft. They'll help you get all sorts of debugging and internal information, though of course you need to figure out what to do with it yourself.

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