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R.I.P. SoftICE

  • Article

A sad, sad day...

As of April 3rd, 2006 the DriverStudio product family has retired. For customer support information please contact our FrontLine website.

https://www.compuware.com/products/devpartner/default.htm

Vast portions of my writing during the 1990s wouldn't have been possible without SoftIce.

For years, I had SoftIce always running, secure in the knowledge that I could drop in and poke around anywhere in the system, at any time.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    April 07, 2006
    Any chance we could see this open sourced?

    I still have softice running all the time.

  • Anonymous
    April 07, 2006
    It feels like the untimely death of an old friend.

  • Anonymous
    April 07, 2006
    I e-mailed the product manager and let him know you were displeased...

  • Anonymous
    April 07, 2006
    I used SoftICE starting way beck when it was first released for DOS (at the not coincidental price of $386).

    Great stuff!

    Had to stop using it when Compuware started pricing it waaay higher.

    Now that MS has re-kindled developement of kd/windbg (starting about 3 years ago?) there's much less need for SoftICE.

    I'd take another look at it if it had a nicer price - maybe Compuware can get some other company to pick it up (but it would be hard to compete against Windows Debugging Tools price of $0).

  • Anonymous
    April 07, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 08, 2006
    This is terrible news. Why did Compuware had to do this?????
    It's really sad to know that SofICE(one of the greatest piece of software ever written, IMHO) will be no longer enhanced further.

  • Anonymous
    April 09, 2006
    I wonder what will take over it's role as the ultimate debugger

  • Anonymous
    April 10, 2006
    Can someone else catch it before it crashes completely...

  • Anonymous
    April 11, 2006
    Speaking of dead and retired software, what happened to the performance profiler in Visual Studio?  Looks like even the "Pro" SKU of VS 2005 doesn't come with one.

  • Anonymous
    April 11, 2006
    The Visual Studio profiler is part of the Team System SKUs: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/teamsystem/reference/technotes/profiling_windows_apps/vsts_profiler.aspx

  • Anonymous
    April 13, 2006
    I really believe it's a terrible mistake. There is no other product that can match the features and ease of use of softice.

  • Anonymous
    April 13, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 18, 2006
    The government told Compuware to 'retire' all low-level tools. Microsoft will offer the only low-level tools for Windows and these tools will require owner registration and have been rewritten so that various tiers of low-level functionality are only available via DRM and "Genuine Low-Level Debugger Owner" checks. And of course the entire thing will be filled with Microsoft phone-homes.

    It's called 'the freedom to trust your government'.

    Cheerio,
    J. Locke
    --
    "The only fence against the world is a thorough knowledge of it. "

  • Anonymous
    April 22, 2006
    <i>Are there any special reasons for this decision. Could you tell us, Matt? What would make your team continue at least SoftICE?</i>

    Why was SoftICE discontinued?  Simple ROI.  The decision was made that the investment in resources would return more profits if spent on other products.

    Could SoftICE have survived with better (any!) marketing and advertising?  Perhaps.  But it's hard to compete with free.  WinDBG may not do everything that SoftICE does, but for many developers it's sufficient.  And Visual Studio's native debugger is sufficient for most ring-3 tasks.

        - Barry

  • Anonymous
    April 27, 2006
    This is very sad and disturbing news.

    We don't just love SI, and everything it has allowed us to do.  We DEPEND on it.

    WinDbg is not a suitable debugger for kernel drivers.  We have several products whose development and maintenance relies on SI.  So we will have to find an alternative, but it will cost us and our users. Ease of use and ease of debugging results in more effective debugging and therefore more stable code.  Losing SI will create a lot of work for us, and we just hope it doesn't result in more bugs.

    I for one would pay more for SI - it's indispensible.

    If they will discontinue it, can't they at least sell it to someone?  Even MS?

    Adrien

  • Anonymous
    April 27, 2006
    I think part of the problem Compuware and NuMega had is that so many people were/are pirating it.
    I do concur with all the people who say that SoftIce is unmatched. There are things SoftIce can do (especially if you use the 3rd party IceExt extention and other such things) that pretty much no other debugger can do.

  • Anonymous
    May 05, 2006
    I'm in  the early stages of a new hardware project, and was evaluating DriverStudio. After this announcement I started looking for another solution, and came up with something that you may find interesting.

    It is a driver development tookit called WinDriver, apparently it's been around for a while. It seems solid enough and I'd like to here your thought about it. The relevant link is http://www.jungo.com/windriver.html.

  • Anonymous
    June 11, 2007
    In a previous post , I lamented the loss of SoftIce. Now, we truly are at the end of an era. Compuware

  • Anonymous
    June 11, 2007
    PingBack from http://msdnrss.thecoderblogs.com/2007/06/11/rip-numega-lab/

  • Anonymous
    November 27, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 05, 2008
    PingBack from http://malblog2.wordpress.com/2008/04/06/in-a-rip-numega-lab/

  • Anonymous
    August 03, 2008
    PingBack from http://michaellocalnews.iwebsource.com/softiceforwindows15.html

  • Anonymous
    May 29, 2009
    PingBack from http://paidsurveyshub.info/story.php?title=under-the-hood-matt-pietrek-r-i-p-softice

  • Anonymous
    June 15, 2009
    PingBack from http://workfromhomecareer.info/story.php?id=13780