The closure of Soft Ice!

Maybe this is an old news to some people, but I just knew that Compuware would no longer be continuing the development of NUMEGA Soft Ice. http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/070611/clm093.html

Starting from 1988 through 2003, I used Soft Ice almost on a daily basis. Without Soft Ice I do not know where I would have been with my career. I purchased almost every single release of Soft Ice. I still have at least four or five boxes of Soft ice and also Driver Works. I personally and other people did many magical things to the Windows systems (DOS, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows Millennium, Windows NT 3.1, Windows NT 4.5, and Windows 2000) using Soft Ice. SoftIce will be greatly missed.

Certainly, Soft Ice will remain as the most powerful debugger ever built for personal computer systems. It is the only debugger that allowed us to do live kernel debugging on the same machine by just pressing Ctrl+D. I  still miss those days when I used to have two monitors connected to my computer, one CGA/EGA monitor connected to a CGA/EGA card for Soft Ice output and another VGA monitor connected to the VGA card for the regular Windows output.

Not sure how many people today will have missed Soft Ice like me, but certainly Soft Ice inspired many generations of personal computer system programmers, and computer hackers as well . Nowadays everyone uses WinDBG which, IMHO, is far less capable than Soft Ice.

More than ten years ago, kernel debugging using WinDBG was very painful, as it required two machines connected to each other via a null modem cable. During those days, SoftIce was the only option for live kernel debugging on the same system. SoftIce has a rich set of debugging commands to debug device drivers as well as the Windowing system. Nowadays kernel debugger and reverse engineering seems to be easier by using a virtual environment like VMWare Workstation or Virtual PC. Microsoft has also made the Windows public symbols available a couple of years ago. So reverse engineering is simpler these days. Nonetheless, nothing similar to the magic of hitting Ctrl+D and jumping immediately into the kernel debugger.

I can only wish that Compuware turns Soft ice into an open source project so that it does not die completely.