Question

As a developer, I am interested in the question of what technology/framework is best for building applications. The ultimate answer is to see what the best (in my opinion) applications are using. Yet, none of them reveal this in their About page. It’s a travesty. Congress should pass a law requiring it. (No, seriously, it’d help the economy.)

A brief Google search didn’t turn up a utility to do this. Does anyone have any tips?

Things I want to know: the platform (Native, .NET, Java, AIR), the GUI toolkit (WPF, Silverlight, Swing, JavaFX, various native ones), fundamental libraries (DI containers, persistence, etc.), etc., etc.

E.g., I am guessing Rosetta Stone is using Adobe AIR. I just started using Ebay’s Turbo Lister today and am both impressed by its sophistication and baffled by its unusual style. What does it use?

Answer 1

Before continuing, I’d like to call out your “Congress should pass a law requiring it” as insane 🙂

Here are some tips on how you can find out such information on Windows:

• Process Explorer and Process Hacker can tell you a ton about a running process.
• Dependency Walker (or command line tools such as VC’s depends.exe GCC’s nm, etc.) can tell you about a executable’s dependencies which are very revealing.
• NTCore’s Explorer Suite can show you a lot about a ton about a executable including it’s resources such as it’s manifest information.

Using the above and similar tools you can find out what technologies, libraries, etc. an application is using pretty quickly.