SysInternals – ProcExp

If there was one of these tools that would make you drool, then this would be it. ProcExp is a process explorer that gives you all sorts of details about the jobs running on your system. After running it the first time, right click on the column bars and pick “Select Columns”, then add a few more useful columns. The most useful of these would be Path, which shows the disk location the exe or dll launched from. Version is also useful, you may find more that have meaning for you.

Next, select View, Show Lower Pane. Then select View, Lower Pane View, and pick DLLs. OK, now here’s something really cool, especially for you .Net developers. See the image above, there are two processes that are highlighted in yellow. The yellow (and these colors are customizeable) indicates this is a .Net application. You can see I have two .Net apps, RSSBandit and PaintDotNet. Click on one of the yellow bars (in this case I picked PaintDotNet). You’ll see the lower pane populate, as in the picture below.

What you are seeing is a long list of all the DLLs loaded by your app. Way cool huh? You can see all the dependencies needed by your (or someone elses) program. Cool, but there’s more! Double click on the app line (again, the yellow line with PaintDotNet).

You can see a new dialog with detailed info about the program. You can kill off the program, or bring it to the foreground. There’s lots of tabs you can click on, I’ll highlight a couple of the most useful ones. Click on the Performance Graph tab.

This produces graphs similar to the ones Task Manager gives you, only this is targeted at just this particular app. Great tool for monitoring your program, looking at memory usage, CPU usage, etc. The Performance tab gives you similar information, only in a textual view.

Now go click on the .Net tab. You can see a list of the AppDomains. Click on the drop down (shown below) and you can see a list of the various performance counters you can view.

Lots of great info in this area, below I’ve pasted the Memory stats, just to give you an idea.

There’s more info to be found here than I can describe in this brief blog post. Take some time, dive in and look around. This tool can really assist you in determining the impact your application will have on the target system.