Jim Holmes and James Avery’s book “Windows Developer Power Tools” now has a companion website. WinDevPowerTools is a simple, yet interesting website. Once you register you can create your own toolbox letting you share with others those utilities you find useful. You can then browse via the tag cloud and “love” those tools you think worthy.

Right now it appears that only Jim and James can add tools (they’re working on getting the ones from their book up). I think a tool submission page would really be useful. Letting users submit tools would add to the overhead of the site of course, and I’m not sure if the authors are willing or able to take the responsibility. Even though currently the only method of getting a tool added is to email James. So maybe it would actually free him up more. However, I think a user based submission method could really add to the usefulness of the site. There’s a definite feeling of community trying to be built (after all one of the authors helped organize CodeMash), freeing up the tool submission process would really increase that. Maybe that’s coming down the road.

The site opens up the possibility for some interesting statistical profiling. Adding the ability to add some user specific profile information (i.e. industry, location, etc) could lead to some interesting information beyond the current “Most Loved Tools”. I’d be interested to see what tools were in how many toolboxes broken down by industry, location, or even age group. Right now you just submit desired nick, email, and desired password. Which may be a big plus to some people, but limits any of the interesting reporting that would be possible. Of course any demographic information should be totally optional.

One of the hallmarks of the developer community is the sharing of information, a site like this could definitely help with disseminating information on tools. I could see sites created for Mac and Linux very easily (maybe with companion books?), with a unified toolbox between the sites. Especially with the number of open source cross platform tools.

WDPT is a site just starting out, but with the possibility of being very useful to the Windows developer community, sort of a FreshMeat for the rest of us with a bit of social networking for spice. Be sure to check it out!

I found out that the Sysinternals Suite has been published by Mark Russinovich via MSDN Blogs, ironically there’s no mention on his blog about this release. Anyway, Sysinternals stuff has always been good, but the Suite page doesn’t list the contents of the download. It only contains this vague description:

This file contains the individual troubleshooting tools and help files. It does not contain non-troubleshooting tools like the BSOD Screen Saver or NotMyFault.

So in the interest of community involvement, for your reading pleasure, here are the contents of the Suite:

1. accesschk: return access rights by user or group
2. accessenum: shows you who has access to what
3. adrestore: undelete active directory objects
4. autologon: autologon utility
5. autoruns: view system startup info in a gui
6. autorunsc: command line version of the above
7. bginfo: create backgrounds with system info
8. cacheset: control the Cache Managers working set size
9. clockres: find timer resolution
10. contig: by file defragmenter
11. ctrl2cap: makes the capslock a control key
12. dbgview: display DbgPrint calls
13. diskext: Display volume disk-mappings
14. diskmnt: diskmonitor for NT
15. diskmon: monitor disk access
16. diskview: disk sector utility with GUI
17. du: disk usage
18. efsdump: encrypted file information
19. filemon: monitor file access
20. handle: show open file handles
21. hex2dec: convert hex to decimal
22. junction: Create NTFS symlinks
23. ldmdump: dump the logical disk managers database
24. listdlls: show loaded dlls
25. livekd: realtime kernel debug
26. loadord: display device load order
27. logonsessions: lists active logins
28. movefile: move inuse files on next reboot
29. newsid: change a computer SID
30. ntfsinfo: file system info
31. pagedfrg: defrag page file and registry.
32. pendmoves: show file moves scheduled for next reboot
33. physmem: physical memory viewer
34. pipelist: view current pipes
35. portmon: Monitor port activity
36. procexp: Process Explorer, monitor running proccess
37. ProcFeatures: process information
38. Procmon: monitor file system, registry, and processes
39. psexec: execute processes remotely
40. psfile: show remotely opened files
41. psgetsid: display SID of computer or user
42. psinfo: get system info
43. pslist: process info
44. pskill: kill processes
45. psloggedon: whose logged on?
46. psloglist: dump event logs
47. pspasswd: change passwords
48. psservice: control services
49. psshutdown: shutdown/reboot a computer
50. pssuspend: suspend a process
51. regdelnull: deletes nondeletedable registry keys
52. reghide: creates hidden registry keys
53. regjump: go straight to a registry key
54. regmon: monitor registry activity
55. rootkitrevealer: scan for rootkits
56. sdelete: DoD compliant secure delete
57. shareenum: scan file shares for security holes
58. sigcheck: File version and signature checker
59. streams: view alternate NTFS streams
60. strings: strings utility
61. sync: flush data to disk
62. tcpvcon: console version of tcpview
63. tcpview: view open sockets
64. volumeid: set labels on FAT or NTFS drives
65. whois: whois service
66. winobj: object manager viewer
67. zoomit: zoom and draw on the screen

These are all great utilities, now that you know what’s in it, grab the Suite from Microsoft!