Roy's musings

For quite sometime now I was searching for a tool that will help me in finding out the dependent DLLs for a given EXE/DLL (like ldd in Solaris/Linux). I came across an amazing utility today called Dependency Walker . Its really neat and cool in finding out the broken dependencies.

How do you go to a tab in control panel directly from command prompt? Under the system32 directory, you will find a few *.cpl files. Running these files will take you directly to the control panel tab corresponding to them. For e.g. appwiz.cpl will take you to "Add/Remove Programs" tab in control panel. You can get a complete list of these files from this Microsoft Knowledge Base article . It saves a lot of time especially when you are running in a lesser privileged account and want to switch to admin account to install/uninstall programs.

To compete with Unix style shells (really?) , the Windows PowerShell is out for you to try. As per the information available in the web site, the PowerShell comes with more than 130 standard command line tools, that will make the automation job of every administrator a breeze. What more, all these tools have been made to have a standard and consistent interface. Why such an insistence on this? Do you know that there is tskill.exe and taskkill.exe ? Though both of them apparently seem to be doing the same business, they are not. The first is a subset of the other and the way you specify the arguments is also a little different. Go ahead ... try now! Like these, there are a couple of more anomalies too. I guess MS is known for such kind of inconsistent interface, at least when it comes to command line interface. Hence it is understood and appreciated when MS says all these tools have a common consistent interface.