Display PDB age in PEViewer

winsiderss / systeminformer

A free, powerful, multi-purpose tool that helps you monitor system resources, debug software and detect malware. Brought to you by Winsider Seminars & Solutions, Inc. @ http://www.windows-internals.com

https://systeminformer.sourceforge.io

MIT License

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Display PDB age in PEViewer #1901

Open MarekKnapek opened 10 months ago

MarekKnapek commented 10 months ago

Description of the feature, modification, idea or suggestion

If you double click a process, process details window appears. If you click on magnifying glass icon, PEViewer appears. This application displays various information about an exe or dll file. For example, it displays pdb file name.

It would be nice to also display pdb age.

PDB age is necessary information to assemble a symbol server path, so the user could download debug information. Maybe also generate download link in case of Microsoft signed or Windows signed binaries? I mean both download links, first for a binary, second for debug info. This would be useful in case of repeated attempts to keep up with dyndata for https://github.com/winsiderss/systeminformer/issues/1823. More information how symbol path is assembled is available on Bruce Dawson's blog https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2013/03/09/symbols-the-microsoft-way/.

Proposed implementation details (optional)

No response

jxy-s commented 10 months ago

This would be a convenient feature. But I don't see how this would make keeping up with dyndata any better.

MarekKnapek commented 10 months ago

My main point is to add PDB age. If the tool already displays PDB name/path, it would be nice to display the age also.
My secondary point is to display path to symbol server. Maybe even if user has not configured %_NT_SYMBOL_PATH%. In this case display relative path on the server. This would be useful even for non-Microsoft binaries, it would help the user to navigate on local disk or on SMB share for example (symbol server can be located on local disk or on SMB share, not necessary on HTTP) of product the user is developing in their company.
My third point is that I'm trying to be helpful and provide HTTP path to kernel binary and PDB for my system (Windows Server) in order to fix the dyndata thing. Maybe this my action is not useful for you and you already have some polished process in place to obtain the PDBs. If this is the case, then of course, adding such functionality to PEViewer is not worth the effort.

jxy-s commented 10 months ago

I hear you, your points are valid and I agree that it will be a nice and convenient feature. I do not disagree with your suggestion. I appreciate you providing the URL to the PDB files.

My comment on "keeping up with dyndata any better" was because - even if the URL is provided, that doesn't make Microsoft publish them any faster.