Raymond Lewallen

Framework Design, Agile Coach, President Oklahoma City Developers Group, Microsoft MVP C#, TDD, Continuous Integration, Patterns and Practices, Domain Driven Design, Speaker, VB.Net, C# and Sql Server

Wincv - The Windows Forms Class Viewer

Saw a funny post on this blog earlier, and thought maybe a lot of people don’t know about the tools in SDK. One of them is wincv, and if you don’t know about wincv.exe, you’ve been missing out. If you use reflector, then you haven't been missing out, and I like reflector better, personally.

Wincv is the windows forms class viewer. It lets you find information about a class simply by typing in a search string. If I launch wincv (location in “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003\SDK\v1.1\Bin” so it helps to have this in your PATH) and type in “DateTime”, I get what you see below:

The default assemblies it loads for searching are: mscorlib.dll, System.dll, System.Data.dll, System.Design.dll, System.DirectoryServices.dll, System.Drawing.dll, System.Drawing.Design.dll, System.Messaging.dll, System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Soap.dll, System.ServiceProcess.dll, System.Web.dll, System.Web.Services.dll, System.Windows.Forms.dll, System.XML.dll

For more information, see the MSDN documentation for Wincv.exe

Published Jul 20 2005, 04:10 PM by Raymond Lewallen

Filed under: .Net Development

Comments

Sahil Malik said:

Hmm .. I forget why exactly .. but Reflector was in certain instances better than WinCV .. !! but I forget why !! :-/

# July 20, 2005 9:25 PM

darrell said:

Yeah, using the find feature in Reflector works exactly the same.

# July 21, 2005 5:25 AM

Dan said:

Where do I find Wincv.exe to download and put back into my programs?

# October 25, 2005 3:27 PM

Raymond Lewallen said:

Dan,

Look on your original Visual Studio installation CDs.

# October 25, 2005 3:42 PM

alexbanceanu said:

can anyone please put it somewere on the web? its not in .NET 2.0 anymore

# August 31, 2006 6:00 PM

wiadran said:

@alexbanceanu i've had the same problem - so I installed framework 1.1

You can download it from msdn:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9b3a2ca6-3647-4070-9f41-a333c6b9181d&DisplayLang=en

# October 25, 2006 8:19 PM

rajul said:

i want to know how wincv will work in 2.0 or i their any other command which will be used insted of wincv in .net 2.0

# March 18, 2007 11:20 AM

robert said:

Rajul,

See www.thecave.com/.../using_wincvexe_with_net_20.aspx

# October 25, 2007 4:05 PM

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About Raymond Lewallen

Working primarily in the public sector during his career, Raymond has designed and built several high profile enterprise level applications for all levels of the government. Raymond now works as a solutions architect for EMC. Raymond is an agile coach, Microsoft MVP C# and also president of the Oklahoma City Developers Group and Oklahoma Agile Developers Group. Raymond spends a lot of his time learning and teaching such things as Test Driven Development, Domain Driven Design, Design Patterns and Extreme Programming practices and principles, to name a few. Raymond is also an advocate of Alt.Net. Raymond is primarily a framework guy, so don't ask him anything about UI :)