Big News for Developers

The web has been busy with news about .NET 3.0 going RTM, along with Office 2007, Vista, etc. But some other news that hasn’t received quite as much publicity is news regarding Sysinternals at Microsoft. There were a couple of posts today that I thought were very interesting.

The first post is about the move from the original Sysinternals site over to Microsoft. I think the best part of the announcement is the focus on letting the “community demand help drive [their] priorities.” A few of the comments have been negative regarding the decision to not post the source code to the tools, but that is the only negative thing that I can see in the post. Besides, if people want the source enough, maybe Microsoft will put it back out again. They listened when people complained about the Vista EULA didn’t they?

The second post is even better news. In addition to some new releases of some great tools from Sysinternals (mostly to support Vista), a new tool has been released called Process Monitor! Process Monitor takes all of the functionality provided by RegMon and FileMon and combines them with even more information such as information about threads! If you’re worried that it will put too much into one place because it was nice to focus only on registry or file access, don’t because with the click of a button, you can tell it to only display registry changes, file changes, or thread changes. If you want to get straight to the main Process Monitor page, it is here.

Here’s a screenshot of Process Monitor in action:

Unrelated to this post, but I used the Snipping Tool in Vista to get this screenshot. It works pretty well.