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.<p>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.
<a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/wqzc9/windows_executable_walkthrough_graphic/" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/wqzc9/windows_e...</a><p>In the reddit thread the original author said: "I will also do a linux (ELF) version, but not in the near future."<p>For a Mac OS X version he would need a Mac (which he don't has.)
Nice one. I'd love to see a walkthrough for .NET executables[1].<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Executable#.NET.2C_metadata.2C_and_the_PE_format" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Executable#.NET.2C_met...</a>
For any new reverse engineers in Hacker Newsland, another win32 PE classic is Ero Carrera's diagram from 2005: <a href="https://www.openrce.org/reference_library/files/reference/PE%20Format.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.openrce.org/reference_library/files/reference/PE...</a>
- The PDF takes forever to render in Adobe PDF Reader 9.<p>- The Content-Type of the SVG is text/plain so Firefox doesn't render it.<p>- The JPG has a Content-Disposition of "attachment" so Firefox forces me to download it locally.<p>Not a pleasant experience.