Fravia's TOOLS OF OUR TRADE Messageboard ~ Moderated
SoftIce Initialization
Wednesday, 20-Jan-99 05:43:03

Is there any info published about how SoftIce actually operates as part of Windows 95? I purchased the book "Debugging 32-bit Windows Applications" by Nancy Nicolaisen, but it was pretty light on internal details such as this for the Numega tools. I bought another book from the SCBC about SoftIce itself, but returned it unread because it was about the old Version 2 product and had even less information.

Does Numega rely on non-discloure info from Microsoft to make its tools work? Do I need to understand VxD development to really understand what this is all about?

Part of the reason for asking this is that I was playing around with SoftIce, which worked for a while, but after I disabled SoftIce loading in AUTOEXEC.BAT and then re-enabled it several days later, SoftIce no longer would come up with the CTL D hot key - no error messages - no nothing. If I then ran Winice.exe, it said that "Enhanced 386 mode is already running". Is there any way of debugging SoftIce itself? (Incidentally, the InstallShield script decompiler blows up on the SoftIce script with a variant index error.)

I've run into lots of conflicts between VC++, the Norton Crash Defender etcx., which when combined with the basic instability of Windows 95 itself, seesm to introduce a lot of almot impossible to locate bugs into the debugging process itself.
I'm worried that if I got serious about using a tool like SoftIce for serious commercial development, I might get stuck with an expensive product which I can't get to work, and there isn't any alternative product on the market.

The support on the NuMega WEB site seems pretty minimal - maybe they do a lot of hand holding with commercial customers, looking over dumps and so on - that seems to me to be the only way that you could be reasonably guaranteed to get the program to run.

AJR


Alan J. Robinson