SoftICE is a debugger for Windows. There are lots of debuggers in the world, of course, but SoftICE is a system debugger, and there aren't nearly so many of those. System debuggers are also sometimes called kernel debuggers, because they are capable of stepping through code in the operating system's kernel and device drivers, rather than just applications. And that's probably enough said about that; if you've somehow found these pages you're probably already well aware of what a kernel debugger does.
SoftICE was originally developed and sold by NuMega Technologies. Several years ago they were bought by Compuware, and SoftICE was repackaged into several driver development suites. Then in April of 2006, SoftICE was "retired". So you can't buy it anymore. If you're resourceful, you can probably locate a copy somewhere. The last shipping version was 4.3.2.
I was of the developers of SoftICE for the last few years of its life. I left about a year before it was retired.
I put these pages up because there's no place on the web where you can go to get good information about using SoftICE, and that's a shame. (Well, there are a bunch of sites for crackers, but that's another kettle of fish.) It's a very powerful tool, but it's not always easy to use, and there are some things that aren't explained all that well in the manual.
Copyright 2004, Geoff Hickey. All rights reserved.