Windows Executable Walkthrough Graphic

http://pe101.corkami.com/

by philthom • 14 years ago

209 34 14 years ago

pe101.corkami.com

pud• 14 years ago

One of the things that's held back Windows and made it so complex, according to an MS engineer I recently spoke with who's been with the company since the 80's, is that it contains thousands of pieces of code to fix bugs in third-party software.

In other words, there's code in Windows 7 that prevents crashing due to a rare bug in Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego v1.3 (hypothetical example). And so on.

quotemstr• 14 years ago

Relevant Old New Thing post: "The real cost of compatibility is not in the hacks; the hacks are small potatoes"

(The Old New Thing is a blog by veteran Microsoft shell team developer Raymond Chen, and it's a must-read for all developers.)

https://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2007/07/23/4003...

rburhum• 14 years ago

"a must read" for all Windows developers.

nodata• 14 years ago

> One of the things that's held back Windows

It's also one of the things that's kept Windows strong.

TeMPOraL• 14 years ago

Real example I heard on internship interview at MS:

Printers lie. Printers have embedded fonts and when you can use them instead rendering the text in software, the results end up better. But printers lie about which fonts they have and which characters are represented in them, so Word has (or used to have) this very big lookup table that basically tells "if you're printing on printer X from vendor Y, don't trust what it says about fonts and just send rendered text to it".

ZoFreX• 14 years ago

Windows 95 contains special memory management code for the original Sim City, but I suppose that probably got removed with all the other 16-bit supporting files in x64 versions of Windows, at least. Perhaps it's still hanging around in 32-bit Windows 7, though?

wslh• 14 years ago

Imagine legacy stuff and standards on the web after 32 years!

Simucal2• 14 years ago

This is great but why is English the only version that is in jpg rather than png?

iso-8859-1• 14 years ago

because you do not deserve better if your browser supports neither PDF nor SVG?

Simucal2• 14 years ago

I was browsing on the original iPad. For some reason, certain PDFs seem to stress it out when rendering and it really lags. It also did not correctly display the SVG link.

So all I was left with was the JPG link which was unfortunate because of the lossy compression which makes the finer details slightly blurred.

A PNG would have been perfect and I noticed that all other languages had a link to a PNG but english.

ange4771_3• 14 years ago

No big difference: unlike what I initially thought, the JPG didn't look much better or worse than the PNG, with a similar filesize.

_sh• 14 years ago

Nice one. I'd love to see a walkthrough for .NET executables[1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Executable#.NET.2C_met...

Zolomon• 14 years ago

You can always start investigating yourself first! :)

nekitamo• 14 years ago

http://www.ntcore.com/files/dotnetformat.htm

marcusrobbins• 14 years ago

This is awesome :)

wamatt• 14 years ago

Or sad. Depending on your outlook ;)

MarkSweep2• 14 years ago

Is Mach-O on OS X or ELF on Linux any more or less sad?

ralfd• 14 years ago

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/wqzc9/windows_e...

In the reddit thread the original author said: "I will also do a linux (ELF) version, but not in the near future."

For a Mac OS X version he would need a Mac (which he don't has.)

melicerte• 14 years ago

"made entirely under Inkscape" +1

jpoehls• 14 years ago

This is awesome. I would love to see versions of this for Linux and OS X.

jjguy• 14 years ago

For any new reverse engineers in Hacker Newsland, another win32 PE classic is Ero Carrera's diagram from 2005: https://www.openrce.org/reference_library/files/reference/PE...

ange4771_3• 14 years ago

Ero is actually planning to release his other 2 commercial diagrams, that you can see http://blog.dkbza.org/2007/10/openrceorg-goodies.html in preview He's just lacking motivation ATM, so contact him if you're interested.

kbolino• 14 years ago

- The PDF takes forever to render in Adobe PDF Reader 9.

- The Content-Type of the SVG is text/plain so Firefox doesn't render it.

- The JPG has a Content-Disposition of "attachment" so Firefox forces me to download it locally.

Not a pleasant experience.

ange4771_3• 14 years ago

I don't control any of these sadly. the image is easily viewable at http://imgur.com/a/t33Rr though.

Windows Executable Walkthrough Graphic

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