Our Most Popular Resources for Developers

Helpful Tools

• WinDbg is an absolutely indispensable tool for any serious developer. You can look into dump files, check the threads, stacks and module versions and even (sometimes <g>) get information on locals. Microsoft has recently released a preview of a Windows Store App that adds a nice UI.


• Sysinternals Suite is a no-brainer to install. Process Monitor lets you find the culprit for any file or registry access - including stacks. And Process Explorer helps to kill the process that locks the DLLs you currently want to build.


• Fiddler, a free web debugging proxy, is great for debugging http(s) traffic, decoding request headers and responses etc.


• bcTester is a freeware tool that can be used to decode the contents of most barcodes. It's very useful to check the contents, encoding etc. It also can handle GS1 data.


• The recent versions of Microsoft Visual Studio also include very interesting tools such as the Performance Profiler to investigate CPU usage (individual threads, durations, etc.) or the memory usage of different code segments. A good introduction to this can be found here.


• In addition to the tools already included in Visual Studio, the well-known Deleaker is also used to record and then selectively eliminate a wide variety of leak types such as memory, GDI and handles. Of course, this is not only used when problems occur. It should also be used after new implementations of features in order to exclude any anomalies in advance. Cyclical reviews of the entire application should also be considered at regular intervals.


• Ref12 is a very helpful Visual Studio extension that forwards F12 on .NET Framework class members to ReferenceSource.Microsoft.com, which shows you the source code right there in your browser.


• Debwin4 is not only our customers favorite tool to record List & Label commands, if something doesn't work as you want it to. Because of its good performance and versatile filtering capabilities, it is also used by us in various tools and applications.

Useful Documentation

• Microsoft Developer Network - MSDN is an inexhaustible source of information about Windows programming and it's almost impossible to imagine any developer without it. The Microsoft API and reference catalog is a good starting point. For the native Windows API there is a very good overview in the area Windows API Index. And the .NET Framework Class Library is especially suitable for the .NET area.


• Stack Overflow helps if it gets trickier and you can't get any further with the board funds. You will certainly find an interesting approach or impulse in the right direction. There is a solution for everything. For combit List & Label there is even the tag 'listlabel'.

Please let us know, if you have anything to add to this list or what you found most useful. We'd love to hear about it.

Author: Daniel Stein
Consultant, Development & Cooperations

Daniel trained with combit as a programmer specialized in software development. He is now engaged in software development and fosters business cooperations. He conducts software trainings and supports the sales team as technical advisor. In his spare time he enjoys mountainbiking around Lake Constance and in the Swiss Alps closeby.