Solving the Puzzle

Searching for solutions to technical problems can be frustrating. You know what you are trying to accomplish but don’t know which tools and techniques will help you solve the problem. Web searches tend to focus on the names of tools and techniques and don’t often include the name of the problem in an easily searchable form. My goal is to fix that problem by organizing the content by solution. For example you know you want to track open files in the operating system of your choice but you don’t know what tools allow you to do that. Search for “open files” and find the solution without having to wade through pages and pages of unrelated material. My philosophy is “find it, fix it, done”. You have better things to do than wade through reams of unrelated material.

This month I am focusing on common problems that we all run into:

• A beginners primer on Windows PowerShell
• What program has a file open?
• What are the environment variables that a program sees?
• What command line parameters was a program started with?
• How long has that questionable hard drive been running? Do those occasional errors indicate impending failure?
• What registry keys and files does a program interact with during its lifetime?
• Fixing a re-occurring Visual Studio crash when opening your solution file

And a few things that maybe aren’t so common

• Why should you bother learning assembly
• A first example in assembly, and its detailed deconstruction.
• Identifying loops in machine code