ntobjx: NT objects
This utility is meant to be an open source replacement of WinObj. I have dabbled with the NT object manager namespace before and there are some other corners of Windows systems which are usually hard to explore using default Win32-APIs.
This utility aims to shed some light into these dark corners of Windows systems.
You can find screenshots in the documentation.
Dieses Programm gibt es jetzt auch auf Deutsch. Entsprechend der Einstellungen eures Benutzerkontos wird das Programm ggf. schon direkt auf Deutsch gestartet. Ansonsten könnt ihr F11 oder das "View"-Menü zum Umschalten benutzen. Viel Spaß!
Die deutsche Dokumentation findet sich hier.
Defekte könnt ihr mir gern auch auf Deutsch melden.
Hey there. Yes, you. Want to see this program in your native language? Feel confident enough to translate any existing translation into your native tongue? If so, please send a pull request with the translated .rc file or alternately file a ticket here to get in touch.
A code-signed version of the utility can be found in the download section. Please be sure to verify the signature using either signtool or sigcheck from live.sysinternals.com (both from Microsoft).
There is also a PGP-signed .7z archive. The signature is detached and carries the file extension .asc. These archives contain the debug symbols (.pdb) alongside the executables. The name contains the revision number and the short changeset ID, so I don't need to remove old builds all the time due to name clashes.
The utility already duplicates the functionality of WinObj and surpasses it. It allows you to export a text or XML representation (both using Unicode) of the object manager namespace.
The utility should work on Windows 2000 and newer. Windows NT 4.0 and older are explicitly unsupported (although the source can probably be adapted to run on those). Please note that not all builds may run with Windows versions prior to Windows XP SP2/SP3. So while the source code can be targeted at Windows 2000, e.g. by using the WDK build method or VS2005, the configuration or compiler may not actually generate compatible code (e.g. VS2017 will only support down to Windows XP, but not Windows 2000).
I still prefer Visual Studio 2005 and therefore the projects and solution which I committed to the repository are of that format. However, the premake4.lua should allow you to generate projects and solution for a newer Visual Studio at will. Potential caveat: you may need to use my own premake4 flavor, as I have not tested the premake4.lua against the stock version. However, you can find pointers to that end at the top of premake4.lua.
I noticed that newer versions of the Windows SDK contain a more complete winternl.h file, such that some of the typedef declarations in ntnative.h may be duplicates and the compiler may choke. If you find any such cases, please file a ticket to point them out to me.
More details on how to build can be found in the project Wiki.
Using the correct premake4 flavor the creation of the solutions and projects is as easy as:
premake4 vs2005For example to create all solutions and projects for VS 2005 through VS 2017 in parallel:
for %i in (vs2005 vs2008 vs2010 vs2012 vs2013 vs2015 vs2017) do @premake4 %iAnd don't worry, the names of the solutions and projects contain the version of Visual Studio and therefore won't clash.
Personally I currently use VS 2005 to build release versions, but VS 2017 to develop the utility.
If you are merely interested in listing the objects, you can pass the parameter --cmdline to your invocation of premake4 and it will generate an extra project named ntobjx_c inside the solution. This project also is a nice show case for just the stuff provided in objmgr.hpp, so if you want to play with that or understand it, you needn't sift through lots of GUI related code.
Don't look any further than said command line tool.
Some people call them "bugs", but "bug" misses the distinction between cause (the defect), propagation of the defective program state and symptom (the defective behavior exhibited). I prefer the terminology as proposed by Andreas Zeller in his book Why Programs Fail (2nd ed.). Therefore I call them defects.
Now, if you find one of those, please report them here. Feel free to use German, English or - if absolutely necessary - Russian to describe the erratic behavior. Please make sure to provide some way to contact you for more feedback. One easy way is to log into SourceForge and file a ticket as logged on user.
The GUI utility itself is released under Microsoft Public License (MS-PL), the license under which the Windows Template Library (WTL) comes. That is owed to the fact that I am not a lawyer and therefore cannot judge how compatible that license is with other licenses. For example the MS-PL is not compatible with the GPL for all I know. Meaning that linking the WTL into a program under GPL would not be possible.
However, I am dual-licensing all of my source files under the MIT license and MS-PL. The resulting binary is released under the terms of the MS-PL, but the individual source files are released under both licenses. The WTL source files remain licensed the way they are offered on the official website (i.e. MS-PL).
This is meant to allow my code to be reused under a permissive license, while at the same time complying with the requirements of the MS-PL.
The texts for both licenses can be found in LICENSE.txt and wtl/MS-PL.txt respectively.