joeware - never stop exploring... :)

It is old news at this point but Microsoft has aquired Winternals and with it gets Sysinternals. This is both good and bad news from my viewpoint.

It is good news to hear that MSFT picked up two strong technical guys, I look forward to Mark adding considerable value to the platform group.

It is bad news that a strong third party tool producer is now removed from the scene, especially folks who produce valuable and FREE tools. Sysinternals is a big reason why I started making my tools available to everyone because I saw how much their tools helped me and I felt that some of the stuff I had written would help others just as much. On top of that, Mark has been extremely vocal in the community and proven a lot of stuff is possible that if you asked MSFT, might not have heard the same thing. I am sure that a lot of Mark’s voice and flexibility will be impacted by joining the mother ship.

I went and poked around the sysinternals site today to see what was being said and noticed that it was considerably slower than normal, in fact it is still running a little slow. I expect there are a lot of people pulling down tools in fear that the whole site will be shut down. Obviously the decision can change but I have heard out of multiple parts of MSFT that the idea is to keep it out there.

I would like MSFT to go even further and make that the new resource kit tool area. All of the tools and toys that some of the brilliant folks in Microsoft have put together but for one reason or another couldn’t put into an officially supported product or on the main web site can be published to the sysinternals site. That would rock. I have seen quite a few cool little utilities that for the most part don’t see the light of day outside of Microsoft and they really should make it out. There are a lot of good ideas that maybe aren’t good enough or polished enough to go into a product line but could still be incredibly useful.

One that fits that category is a tool called RichCopy. It is an amazingly useful gui (command line launched) multithreaded copy program. Kudos to Kenzaburo Tamaru for it. I think a lot of folks would find the tool very useful. I personally have thought about writing a replacement for it several time but it is so good on its own that I never can get myself together to replace it.

Anyway back to the whole sysinternals/winternals thing… See Mark’s blog here http://www.sysinternals.com/Blog/