Windows sysinternals

Introduction xxiii
The Sysinternals utilities fell into three basic categories: those used to help programmers,
those for system troubleshooting, and those for systems management. DebugView, a utility
that captures and displays program debug statements, was one of the early developeroriented
tools that I wrote to aid my own development of device drivers. DLLView, a tool for
displaying the DLLs that processes have loaded, and HandleEx, a process-listing GUI utility
that showed open handles, were two of the early troubleshooting tools. (I merged DLLView
and HandleEx to create Process Explorer in 2001.) The PsTools, discussed in Chapter 6, are
some of the most popular management utilities, bundled into a suite for easy download.
PsList, the first PsTool, was inspired initially by the UNIX “ps” command, which provides a
process listing. The utilities grew in number and functionality, becoming a software suite of
utilities that allowed you to easily perform many tasks on a remote system without requiring
installation of special software on the remote system beforehand.
Also in 1996, I began writing for Windows IT Pro magazine, highlighting Windows internals
and the Sysinternals utilities and contributing additional feature articles, including a
controversial article in 1996 that established my name within Microsoft itself, though not
necessarily in a positive way. The article, “Inside the Difference Between Windows NT
Workstation and Windows NT Server,” pointed out the limited differences between Windows
NT Workstation and Windows NT Server, which contradicted Microsoft’s marketing message.
As the utilities continued to evolve and grow, I began to contemplate writing a book on
Windows internals. Such a book already existed, Inside Windows NT (Microsoft Press, 1992),
the first edition of which was written by Helen Custer alongside the original release of
Windows NT 3.1. The second edition was rewritten and enhanced for Windows NT 4.0 by
David Solomon, a well-established operating system expert, trainer, and writer who had
worked at DEC. Instead of writing a book from scratch, I contacted him and suggested
that I coauthor the third edition, which would cover Windows 2000. My relationship with
www.it-ebooks.info