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Indispensable tools for you from hellbopp

Okay, these are debugging tools for a developer made by a developer. You can run them on Windows NT/2000. I have not made any attempt to try them on XP; but most will probably work. As for Win9x, some probably won't. If you're looking for any UNIX tools, I'm afraid I don't have much in the store to showcase for you.

I have written these tools over a period of time, mostly on an as-needed basis. I am publishing here the ones I think are the most useful. The only thing you pay for all the tools here is credit to yours truly (and the no-indemnification freeware licensing); and do check back for any updates.

I am no web guru, so this page is probably klunky. The same cannot be said of these tools, though, I hope! Let me know if there are any problems or if you needed something more.

CmdPeek Snoop into the command line of a process. This one, I was motivated to write, when I did some java development and I needed the command line to identify which main class was running in which JVM.
 
 
EnvPeek Snoop into the environment block of a process. Now that cmdPeek was written, this one was the obvious successor.
 
 
killP Kill any process including a service
 
 
UserName Get the user name (security context) of a process
 
 
LastErr Get the last error of a thread of a process
 
 
i3Stub Insert a debug breakpoint at the beginning of an executable. When the executable starts, your JIT debugger can then intercept the launch of the executable.

During DCOM development, I realized I needed a way to intercept the moment when a DCOM server started, and launch it in a debugger. This is particularly useful in debugging startup code, and also because many memory management profilers (e.g., BoundsChecker) rely on being able to capture the entire process lifetime.

With JIT debuggers readily available and armed with the PE executable format documentation, all I had to do was to insert the breakpoint opcode at the entrypoint of the executable (usually WinMain or DllMain).

As this utility modifies the original executable, it will not work where digital certificates or checksums have been applied.
 
 
Moriarty

Moriarty can be used as a supplement to get additional information about a program in the event it crashes or terminates abruptly. It is designed to work in conjunction with other JIT or post-mortem analyzers, most notably DrWatson. For more on Moriarty, click here.