DEV Community: DonislawDev

How to Manage Windows Services Without Services.msc

DonislawDev — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 20:40:18 +0000

Services.msc are pretty old and they are missing a tons of the information about services, there are no mass actions, no easy force restart/kill. But we can use Better Windows Services if you like the tool, please give it a star :-) The tool is GUI/CLI

Mass stop/start and more in Windows Services

If we will run the app (with admin rights) we can select multiple services, and do mass actions with them, but watch out, for stopping services which are dependent on others:

The app will show your the plan of your action:

tip: if you would stop a service which would crash you system, the app will warn you about it.

Services.msc with query language

At the search bar, we can use the query language, in my case i had chosen automatic start up + in the search bar I had written memory:>50MB. But there is tons of data + information, here you can see the query language

Stop a Windows service stuck at stopping

We can stop the hanging service from the cmd, or in Better Windows Services if we right click the service, there is option for "force stop":

Because in Windows services there is no thing like "force restart" or "force stop" there is only one way, kill the process:

There are tons more options, and more will come, all things done from the GUI, can be done in the CLI, oh, and there is also snapshoot feature, we can export the services list or see services with missing files and tons of other things.

How to Test Windows Apps with a Different Date and Time

DonislawDev — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 10:46:17 +0000

The fastest way of different date/time testing is changing the system clock, done :-), but if we don't want to change the system time, we can use Chrono Mock, CLI/GUI, open source app for time/date manipulation in apps: Download From GitHub, if you like the tool, please give it a star :-)

Changing app date/time without changing system clock

After launching the app, we need to chose the application that will be affected, we can just drag & drop the app:

Then we can just click the "Start" button, but... By design the date is set to 2038, so we need to set own custom date/time, and in "Date and time" section, same with "Speed and options":

Back up the application's data directory before your first future-dated session. The app will use a different time, so all saved data, saved files will have it

About the different settings in the time section, some of them can crash the app or break the GUI, it depends on the app, in some apps the time manipulation won't work without them, it all depends on the app type. Electron and WebView apps works too.

Date and time calculator for QA

OK, but what dates or time speed should we check? It all depends on what we want to check, there is "calculator" tab in the Chrono Mock, which got some pre-made presets and we can use own scenarios:

But watch out for an "time travel" problem, if you will first set "actul date + x", then you will go back to "actual date" or any "lower" date, your app can behave very strange, because it's not an normal case.

All things in this post can be done from CLI: https://chronomock.donislawdev.com/cli-reference/. I just tried to make this post as simple as possible, under the hood this is a bit more complex, and of course apps that are using time from the network won't be affected by Chrono Mock, it's out of the scope.

Test File Generation for QA & Developers

DonislawDev — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 19:48:27 +0000

From time to time we sometimes need to generate dummy files for testing, we can do it with Testing Files Generator, cross-platform GUI/CLI open source tool, you can Download It From GitHub, please give it a star

Create Test Files

After launching the program, set the fields "Format", "Size", "How many files" and click "Generate", done :-)

This way you can easily create one file or how many you want, with exact size, there are 26+ formats, so chose which one you would like to get

Create Sample Files

Generation from 1) just generate size at exact size, but for testing, you will probably need to customize your files, let's say you want to generate log file.

Most of the files got "settings {formatName") section, in which you can customize the file, in this example, you can set the log content and a lot more:

^ You can also generate damaged files, just select the damage from the "damage" dropdown, you can read more about formats here

Filename Security Testing

Go to "presets" tab under there you got "preset" dropdown, which you can use for chosing boundary testing, upload-vlaidation and tons of other, in my case I will use the "filename-handling", which will generate me tons of files, which can be used to file name security testing, I had chosen the preset and clicked the "generate" button, and here is it:

PS: with each preset comes "instruction.md", you can also read more about presets here

Batch Files Generation

Go to the "Several Batches" tab, then set stat for first batch, add new bath, and set stats for the next one, you can also start the batch from the preset, in my case I want 10 .avif files and 10 .png files in range 1-10mb:

After Setting the stats I can just click "Generate" and it's done:

END

The Testing Files Generator is a lot more advanced than in this tutorial, but I tried to keep it as simple as possible, there is also "manifest" and "recipe" system, manifest is always saying how the file should behave.

There is also an "recipe" which be used for generating test files, let's say you want to have 100GB log file with "x,y,z" but storing it on GitHub is a bad idea, just store it as recipe, and you can easily generate it. You can read more about it here, oh and all the things that were done in this tutorial can be done from the CLI. I was using Windows, but you can use macOS or Linux.

*I'm author of the tool

How to Simulate a Bad Internet Connection on Windows: Test Latency, Packet Loss & Jitter

DonislawDev — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 15:42:21 +0000

Hello, if you want to test your Windows app in poor network conditions, you can use "Bean Network Tester." All things from this post can be done from the GUI or CLI, the tool is open source, 100% free for commercial use.

1. Instalation.

You can get the .msi or .zip from GitHub (please give it a star)

Or install it from package managears:

winget install -e --id DonislawDev.BeanNetworkTester

choco install bean-network-tester

*To use the app, you will need admin rights

2. How to Simulate LTE/3G network or crowded WiFI + more

By design Bean Network Tester will target "ALL NETWORK TRAFFIC", so be sure to set a specific target. The fastest setup is:

Select the "Profile" that you wish to use
Write "Target process"
Click the "Start" Button

This way you can easily test your app in few clicks, each profile comes with own stats like: "Loss, Losses in a row (burst), Latency, Jitter Download,Upload limit" and more.
You can see the full list of profile stats and CLI parameters here

Tip:You can also target by IP or ports:

3.More "advanced" use

The app comes with premade profiles, but you can create your own profiles or settings files, you can experiemnt with with tons of things, let's say you want to check how the app will behave during TCP_Sync drop or TCP_reset:

This way you can customize the app for your own testing and share the profiles with your team

4. Scenarios system

At the bottom of the app, you can see the "scenarios":

there are few premade scenarios (click "Load Scenario...")

They are just .json files that you can add or edit:
"{
"loop": true, "steps": [ { "at": 0, "settings": { "filter": "udp", "dst_port": "53", "latency": 10, "jitter": 5 } }, { "at": 15, "settings": { "loss": 25, "latency": 200, "jitter": 200 } }, { "at": 35, "settings": { "loss": 60, "latency": 750, "jitter": 500 } }, { "at": 55, "settings": { "loss": 100 } }, { "at": 68, "settings": { "loss": 10, "latency": 100, "jitter": 80 } }, { "at": 85, "settings": { "loss": 0, "latency": 10, "jitter": 5 } } ] }
"
You can also create your own scenarios, let's say at 90 second, we would like to reset_tcp, we could just add:
"{ "at": 90, "action": "reset_tcp" },"

5. END

The tool is a lot more advanced, You can see all network options here, but that's not all, because the app comes with a few useful things. There is a "connections" tab in which you can see download/upload stats, packets, and connections.

And there is a "tools" tab in which you can check which ports are being used + active connections without running the packet capture:

In this post, I didn't get into the technical details of burst, tcp/udp or WinDivert which is used in Bean Network Tester, it's mostly a quick start, but if you want to use the app in more "advanced" cases, then it's always an good thing to know a few things about networking.

*I'm the author of the tool