Geoff Chappell - Software Analyst
Last upload: 29th July 2010
The several hundred pages that were added or updated during 2009 are now listed together. Please look over that list, note the scale of this work and that it’s all offered for free as a public good, and consider how you might support this site.
If I am to resume regular writing of independent Windows documentation (see below), it would better be done through a community initiative such as I propose at www.soared.org. I’ve shown well enough, at this site, that reverse engineering can produce information that is useful and reliable. It’s up to others now to help get this sort of work done on a larger scale. What might be achieved with contributions from others who want to develop their skill at reverse engineering Windows? What benefit might be delivered to the very many Windows programmers (and even ordinary Windows users) who sometimes find that what Microsoft documents is not quite enough? If someone can help set up such a thing sustainably, then it can start with whatever content is wanted from the nearly 2,000 pages that are already here.
Although I have for the foreseeable future abandoned my intensive experiment of writing up for free as much as I can of my research into Windows (see below), I can’t help but write occasionally:
Work on this website as the public outlet for reseach into Windows was suspended, or at least greatly curtailed, in September 2009. There may be corrections, because I am of course responsible for what I have written. There may from time to time be some maintenance and tidying up. However, I do not have an organised plan for updates and there will certainly be no new work in the forseeable future. What you see at this site is intended as a free resource, but I just can’t keep adding to it from my own pocket. Who could? If you value what you find here, then please support this site.
The links below provide access to the 329 pages that were added or substantially revised in the not-quite-a-year before suspension. If those pages do not themselves demonstrate the worth of the exercise as a public good, then neither will any amount of additional writing, and the experiment is better judged a failure. That’s a shame. There is so much more to write and so few who try.
There are older pages, of course, but I did not start listing them by date until late 2008.
There are nearly 2,000 pages at this site. Almost all are the product of a 5-year experiment in seeing what is possible from committing as much as I could to research and writing, including for two stretches of nearly 18 months each in which I worked at this exclusively. This self-funded feasibility study is all that ever will come from that, unless a way can be found to make the research and writing pay for itself or unless a sponsor or benefactor funds its continuation as a worthwhile public good. I’ve taken it as far as I can on my own. If you have any ideas for full-time funding, it’s very possibly more than occurs to me with my limited mind for these things, so please send me your suggestion.
I can’t resist repeating that the research at this site is all a matter of inspecting Windows as the practical application of techniques for studying software without having the source code. If there is not more to show from the research, it’s the writing up which is the bottleneck. If there is no continuation of research or writing, it’s economics which provides the brake. Even information that’s given away for the public good is not actually free: digging it up is a lot of work, and packaging it accessibly is even more work. Plenty enough of you seem happy enough to have the information, and I am at least glad when I’m cited as the source, but nobody could do this work just for the citations.
What has been written for this site is very dense in information that Microsoft does not document about Windows and which was first published here. For the material yet covered, nothing elsewhere on the Internet is more detailed and reliable. Inasmuch as open-source software is predicated on the notion that source code is necessary for the useful study of software, I take it as a backhanded compliment that several open-source projects cite this site either for particular pages or generally as a resource for understanding Windows.