1. Introduction
WinID is controls & windows identification utility that is both powerful and compact. Its main purpose is to give an easy way to retrieve information about Windows controls visually right off the screen. We worked hard to make it compatible with almost all versions of Windows Operating System starting from Windows 95 and going up to Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. This all started back in 1999 when I needed some visual way to get information about some controls on the screen. WinID 2.0 was born then. Since that WinID has gone through many changes and now we designed it from the ground up to be 100% compatible with the Windows NT operating system family. The work on WinID is not done yet and we will continue releasing updates to existing version to incorporate more features to retrieve information from Windows controls and programs on the run.WinID resembles Spy++ from the Microsoft Visual Studio toolset in a way it retrieves information from controls on the screen, such as window titles, window handles, control classes and styles, and much much more. I was always bothered that Spy++ produced a long list of existing windows and did not give a user any means to retrieve information about control by simply pointing to it. WinID does not produce a long list of windows, instead it lets you point mouse cursor to any window or control on the screen and displays information about it in the Readout Pane. This process is completely transparent for a program that the information is being extracted from, meaning that you don't have to press any keyboard or mouse buttons - the information is retrieved "on the fly" without interrupting the normal flow of your computer's operation. To retrieve even more specific information about control we incorporated a new feature called Capture Shot, that can collect a wealth of other information upon request.
Now, who would be interested in using WinID? Definitely, a person who knows (or plans to learn) architecture of the Microsoft Windows Operating System - programmer, debugger/tester, beginner. It will definitely be handy for debugging your C/C++/MFC/.NET and Visual Basic applications, as well as learning more about how your favorite programs are made. It is virtually impossible to include all benefits of WinID in this introduction page, so read on and we'll give you a complete lowdown of how this all works.