Clutch
Clutch is my new pet programming project (say that five times fast). It’s an IL level .NET debugger, or at least it will be when it’s finished. It’s the result of the research I’ve been doing in IL and why I’m looking for information about writing debugging tools. The screenshot above is really just for kicks. I thought it would be funny to post the first ever screenshot of the program so that when it’s up and running in a year or so I could look back and laugh. It’s very incomplete right now, but can at least start a new process and list the modules and namespaces that are loaded into memory. It’s not much, but doing even something as simple as that is a pretty big learning curve when you’re working with the Unmanaged API.
The Unmanaged API is the COM interface into the inner workings of the .NET runtime. All the facilities to write a debugger are present; they just have to be used. The time consuming part is writing the managed code that will properly call and handle the COM interfaces.
I hope to detail things I’ve learned about the process in upcoming posts and track the development of the project. The next screenshot might be a while off because I’m already changing the direction I want to go with this program. I’ll give you a hint, the new work I’m doing rhymes with WPF. 
October 23rd, 2007 at 3:45 pm
[…] be found at the link below. This would be fantastic! It would also make my .NET debugger project Clutch almost worthless. One of the big goals I had for Clutch was to be able to debug IL, or at least a […]