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Showing posts from August, 2007

PDB Stream Decomposition

I've been taking a look at the structure of PDB files recently. PDB files are Microsoft's proprietary file format for storing debug information. They are generated by the Visual Studio family of products, and Microsoft has been kind enough to provide a full set of PDB files for its own operating system files since Windows 2000, which means that we get access to a whole bunch of great information like function symbols and type information. These can provide an excellent insight into the internals of the Windows operating system. Naturally, the file format is undocumented and proprietary (there used to be a page on MSDN stating as much, but I can't seem to find it now). However, Sven Schreiber, in his book Undocumented Windows 2000 Secrets: A Programmer's Cookbook , provides details on the format and some sample code for reading the information in such files. Although the original code only deals with PDB files created with Visual Studio 6.0 and below, he has recently r