PSE - Programming WWW Links

PSE - Programming WWW Links

Last modified 2002 AUG 26 15:36:16 GMT

Programmer Links via Microsoft

Microsoft's FTP site. There is A LOT of stuff here. Get the LS-AL.ZIP file from the root directory, and extract it on your machine to make searching for files easier.

Microsoft: For Developers Only.

Microsoft Developer Network News

Microsoft Developer Network (Top Level)

Microsoft Developer's Network FAQ. Cool reference material for serious Windows developers.

Microsoft Knowledge Base

Microsoft TechNet Home Page

General Programmer Links:

MFC graphics. The GO++ (tm) graphics library is an MFC based class library that lets programmers easily create 2D graphical objects and network editors. It is available as a source library, and the authors offer consulting to get your project off the ground quickly.

Andrew Schulman, author of Undocumented Windows and other notable books, has a Web site.

Visual C++/MFC Web site featuring links to other programming sites.

MS Visual C++/MFC FAQ v4.0 at Stingray Software.

Borland Online.

OLE/COM Resource Center.

OCX Development Homepage.

Dolphin Systems, Inc.

devSoft Inc.

Dundas Software.

CompressIT. A compression VBX/DLL for applications wishing to add compression capabilities (capable of memory-memory compression, not just file-file, or file-memory).

Sax Software News.

Sax Comm Objects.

Miller Freeman's Microsoft Windows Resources Homepage.

World Wide Web Library.

Game Programming FTP.

MSDN Off Ramp Home Page.

Legal Care for Your Software Home Page

WINSOCK "X-Ray" monitoring program.

Game programming FTP site (usually VERY busy).

CERA's Windows Development Internet Resources link.

A review of several C++ tools.

Visual Basic Home Page/From the Top. I'm not a Visual Basic programmer myself, but giving that NetCruiser is written in VB, mabey Netcom's programmers should check out this page.

comp.os.msdos-programmer FAQ.

StratosWare is the producer of MemCheck, a memory leak diagnostic for windows programming.

Magazine source CD-ROM. Of interest to people who don't want to spend the time downloading the source from a specific issue of one of about 30 magazines (most of which are NOT titles of interest to a general programming audience, but there are a handful in there).

Eschalon Development. They produce an installer program.

PKWare. They produce PKZIP and PKZIP for Windows, tools nobody should be without. They also have a library for their compressor engine (ZIP v1.x compression though), and their PKLITE tool can compress (for runtime self-extraction) both DOS *AND* windows applications and DLLs.

InfoZIP. This is a multi-platform compressor tool (source available, as well as compiled binaries), which produces files compatible with the PKZIP utility.

C Users Group (CUG). An important stop for any serious C or C++ programmer. The site archives the source from articles in the C/C++ Users Journal, a very worthwhile publication.

Softel VDM. They make a Tab Control as well as a Tree Control OCX custom control DLL.

DirectX Mailing List Archive

Windows NT Links:

If you're a serious Windows programmer, you're probably running Windows 95 or Windows NT right now. With the introduction of Windows NT 4.0 there was a big commotion about the differences between the Workstation and Server versions. The following links discuss the issue at lengh -- showing through empirical methods that the differences aren't as big as Microsoft would like you to believe.

PC WEEK: Simple way found to turn NT Workstation into Server

Minimal NT Server/Workstation Differences

MS protests O'Reilly NT claims

NTWatch a utility to watch the registry on NT.

Inside the Windows 95 and NT Registry

Hacking Links:
I have a page with links of interest to hacking. The links cover various topics.

Ralf Brown's Interrupt list:
This used to be available on SimTel, but after that excellent archive was closed, the best place to find it is at Ralf's site.

Other SimTel mirror sites:
Clarkson SimTel mirror.
Some German SimTel mirror.

And a site that apparently has SimTel archived by YEAR (in Budapest, Hungary):
1992
1993
(BTW - some browsers may not handle the directory information as presented by this site -- it apparently doesn't conform to even a decent knock-off of regular UNIX directories, and so some pasers may stumble on it and show empty directories. There IS stuff there). Oh, and keep in mind -- Hungary is one of those countries from which a lot of viruses ORIGINATE. You've been warned.

Cool sites:
DEC's GateKeeper. Mirrors all sorts of stuff on the net. DEC also runs one of the few FTPMail servers, which allows you to retrieve FTP files via EMail.
America Online (AOL), for all the bashing they take, offers a Mirror for most all of the popular sites on the net. Reportedly, this machine is quite capable of handling large volumes of requests. This site is still made available to people NOT using their service.
Walnut Creek SimTel Mirror. All manner of neat stuff.
Walnut Creek Garbo Mirror. Comes and goes.
Walnut Creek CICA Mirror. Windows files, including some programming stuff and Winsock.
Walnut Creek Algorythms directory.
Walnut Creek Windows-95 directory. Comes and goes.
You can download Plasma 1.10 source code from the Author's home page.
Download Intel's CPU Identification code
Useful bit of code to perform stderr redirection. You need to add fseek( stderr, 0L, SEEK_END ); to append
Cool site with a variety of programmer things (not lots, but several very useful ones)

FAQ sites:
You can FTP the FAQs from the following sites:
ftp.nimh.nih.gov 156.40.186.8 /pub/win3/FAQ
wuarchive.wustl.edu 128.252.135.4 /usenet/comp.binaries.ms-windows/faqs
ftp.metrics.com 198.133.164.1 /faq
The FAQs will have filenames in the format of FAQWINxx.ZIP (Windows), FAQPRGxx.zip (Windows Programmer), and FAQWNTxx.zip where xx is the version number. Please do not abuse these sites; limit your FTP activity to time outside business hours (8 PM EST through 9 AM EST, or 0100 GMT through 1400 GMT).
Hypertext versions of the FAQs are also directly accessible using Mosaic, WinWeb or another Web client.

Things I'm looking for:

I've got an interest in a C/C++ source code shrouder (a program which makes the code appear obfuscated, while still retaining its compileability).

Q: I'm looking for a shareware or commercial C-source code indenter. Are the commercial programmers text editors any good in this?
A: For a commercial program, try C-DOC. Check a programming magazine for their ads. Otherwise, there is indent, to be found on many ftp sites. Most programmer editors don't do so well for REFORMATTING an existing file, but the one I use (MultiEdit, DOS and Windows) does an acceptable job of formatting code as you type it, but that really is only for bracing and comment style. A good indenter program will do a much better.

Q: Where can I find programming information for the Microsoft CD-ROM extensions (MSCDEX)?
A: I can't quite remember where I came upon them in electronic form (oddly, I KNOW it wasn't at Microsoft), but I have a local link to a copy of the MSCDEX v2.1 documentation (little has really changed since). Hope this helps.

Q: Does anyone have some programming info about IPX protocol?
A: Interestingly, the FTP site at ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com has some tidbits on IPX programming, including an IPX programming FAQ! This is because of the network play capability of games like DOOM. It even contains some source code. Send mail to help@idsoftware.com, and you'll get a document index which will tell you the numbers of the docs you wish to retrieve.

Q: What is an inexpensive way to produce a 32-bit protected mode DOS program?
A: Try the DOS extender library called XLIB. You can be using 32-bit protected mode simply with the placement of one include file at the start of your code. Download DXLIB.ZIP from oak.oakland.edu/pub/simtelnet/msdos/c.

Q: Where can I find a good, precise timer function?
A: There is sample code and technical information in a PC Timing FAQ / Application note.
You can either use the BIOS tick count variable in conjunction with the count in the 8253/8254 timer chip (channel 0) or you could use the RTC periodic interrupt, which gives about 1ms resolution. Both techniques are covered.
There are also several packages on SimTel, which are mentioned in the comp.os.msdos.programmer FAQ or the comp.lang.asm.x86 FAQ (not sure which), but several of them are flawed. The Zen timer and its derivative versions are alright, though.
Download and read this for some gotchas about reading the timer chip not commonly documented. Namely, that some BIOSes use the timers in mode 2 rather than mode 3.

Q: Where can I find a decent compression library?
A: Well, I mentioned PKWare's ZIP compression library above, but there is also zlib (a streaming gzip-like compression library). zlib is totally without usage restrictions. zlib is the compression upon which the new PNG graphics format is based (since the popular GIF format uses LZW compression which is patented by money-grubbing UNISYS and now requires a license to support - even in shareware and freeware applications). You can get a version of zlib at: ftp.uu.net or godzilli.cs.sunysb.edu.
A note to remember: if you are using this in conjunction with encryption, an encrypted data stream is essentially non-compressable by conventional (or otherwise) compression methodologies, so you'd be better off compressing data BEFORE you attempt to encrypt it (which also usually serves to reduce plaintext attacks upon your encrypted data).

Sort of interesting thing for people trying to support NTFS (a file system):

Someone has produced a DOS/Windows NTFS disk recognizer called NTFSDOS. The first version only supports READ-ONLY mode of NTFS volumes, but lets you mount them nonetheless. However, is should be noted that I've not actually seen this software in action.

In addition, the executable has reportedly been posted to comp.binaries.ms-windows

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