This is a short guide on how to debug applications or dynamic link libraries created by the free Microsoft C++ compile environment.

The following tools need to be installed:

Microsoft Debug Tools (13MB): c:\msdev\debug
Windows XP with Service Pack 2 symbols (195MB)

Then extend your environment’s LIB path by adding the Visual Studio .NET 2003 lib folder. Visual Studio […]

This is a guide on how to install a free Microsoft C++ development environment on Windows XP SP2. As it is related to Microsoft remember that free in this context is always free as in free beer, and not free as in freedom. The Detours 1.5 package is used as an example in this guide. […]

I did more reverse engineering on the DataRecorder Windows tool that comes with the TFA Klima-Logger hygrometer in order to find out which serial lines are used as input lines.

The evaluation version of IDA Pro Disassembler and Debugger did a great job here. The only thing I had to do was to load the executable […]

For reverse-engineering the Windows software of the TFA Klima-Logger I tried to analyze the I2C protocol over the serial line by intercepting Win32 API system calls.

Searching with Google on the topic intercept Win32 function I stumbled over the Microsoft Research tool Detours which was exactly what I was looking for. Version 1.5 of the tool […]

In order to move serial port support into a loadable module and to have a few module debugging features enabled I decided to compile a custom kernel.

The HOWTO: Kernel compilation guide did not work because no initrd was created. That led into a Kernel Panic when booting the custom kernel.

The following steps describe what I […]