Not about PureText

So PureText has been making the rounds on the blogs. It’s certainly a great little tool, but I thought I would point out something that all the bloggers seems to have overlooked. If you’re not a programmer you probably don’t care, but PureText comes to us from the creator of the Dependency Walker. If you’ve been programming Windows for five minutes (to paraphrase John Robbins) you have surely heard of “Depends”.

Steve Miller is the guy behind PureText, Dependency Walker and a number of other tools which you can find on his website.

Dependency Walker is an incredibly useful tool for examining the dependencies PE files (containing native code) have on other DLLs. Depends is also distributed with Visual Studio.

I just noticed that there is a 64-bit version of Depends. This is good news for me since I do all my work on Windows x64. Oddly the 64-bit version can only open 64-bit PE files while the 32-bit version can only open 32-bit PE files. It’s pretty simple to write code to support both formats. I’ve done it. Matt Pietrek has even written a cool article where he provides a neat solution for supporting both formats in a single build using C++ templates.

Anyway, Steve Miller rocks.

© 2005 Kenny Kerr