from Hacker News

WinDepends – A Rewrite of the Dependency Walker

by bratao on 11/23/24, 12:48 PM with 28 comments

  • by pjmlp on 11/30/24, 11:29 PM

    I never understood why those responsible for Windows SDK dropped Dependency Walker, instead of updating to the new Windows ways of dynamic libraries.

    Most certainly they keep having similar tooling in Redmond.

  • by mistagiggles on 11/30/24, 11:03 PM

    There is also this: https://github.com/lucasg/Dependencies Similar project for replacing the old dependency walker tool
  • by DonnyV on 12/1/24, 10:38 PM

    Its kind of crazy that a person outside of Microsoft is doing this. Why is this not supported by the Sysinternals team?
  • by bhouston on 12/1/24, 12:19 AM

    Nice! I loved and relied on WinDepends back in the day.
  • by secondcoming on 12/1/24, 3:46 PM

    Why does a tool such as this need a server?
  • by MarekKnapek on 12/1/24, 7:52 PM

    There is also this one, but it is no longer maintained. https://github.com/MarekKnapek/DependencyViewer
  • by Dwedit on 11/30/24, 10:54 PM

    Great! Dependency Walker has been nonfunctional since Windows introduced API sets.
  • by thefourthchime on 12/1/24, 7:38 PM

    In the olden times, the internet was so nerdy if you searched on Altavista for "depends" this tool was the top result.
  • by throwaway2037 on 12/1/24, 9:19 AM

    Is there an equivalent of ldd for Win32?
  • by sirjaz on 11/30/24, 11:24 PM

    This is awesome! I hope this doesn't get abandoned.
  • by optimiz3 on 12/1/24, 4:24 AM

    Nice project, just as a challenge / piece of feedback - most of the time you don't actually need to have a C backend for this type of project. The challenge is to get all the P/Invoke signatures and struct declarations / pointer walking correct on .Net. The benefit being a single managed EXE and no need for cross process communication and the edge cases it brings.

    (Source: Have built a full SCSI interop layer in .Net to do low level CD ripping, full with native pointer walking and all. Have also written tools to walk the PEB (process environment block) in .Net w/ no native backends.)