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Depends Overview

  • Article

Applies To: Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2003 with SP1, Windows Server 2003 with SP2

Depends.exe: Dependency Walker

This GUI tool scans any Windows module (including .exe, .dll, .ocx, and .sys, among others) and builds a hierarchical tree diagram of all dependent modules. For each module found, it lists all the functions that are exported by that module, and identifies which of those functions are actually being called by other modules. Another view displays the minimum set of required files, along with detailed information about each file, including a full path to the file, base address, version numbers, computer type, debug information, and more.

Corresponding UI

Depends provides its own user interface.

Depends is very useful for troubleshooting system errors related to module load problems. During the module scan, this tool detects dozens of common application problems such as missing modules, invalid modules, import/export mismatches, circular dependency errors, and mismatched computer types of modules.

Depends is useful for developers, testers, system administrators, creators of setup scripts, and anyone else who needs to examine what dependencies are required to make a specific module load successfully.

Depends runs on Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT 3.51, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003. It can process any Windows modules, including those designed for Windows CE. It can run as a graphical application or as a console application. New features in version 2.0 include C++ function name undecoration, detection of delay-load and dynamic dependencies, application profiling, user-definable search paths, and the ability to save results to several file formats.

Details on running Depends can be found in Dependency Walker 2.0 Help (Depends.hlp), a separate documentation file.

System Requirements

The following are the system requirements for Depends:

  • Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT 3.51, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, or Windows Server 2003 

Files Required

  • Depends.cnt

  • Depends.exe

  • Depends.hlp

  • Depends.dll

See Also

Concepts

Depends Remarks
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