PE

No, not Physical Education, but certainly mental exercise

The PE (Portable Executable) format is used by executables, object code, dynamic-link-libraries (DLLs), and binary files on 32-bit and 64-bit Windows operating systems. These notes accompany Ahmed Hesham's excellent guide A dive into the PE file format. They document my process of learning about the PE format (and by doing so, trying to relearn some C++), by developing some simple software for parsing PE files as I progress through the guide. The intention is not to develop robust software to interrogate PE files: existing software is available that does this much better. Instead, this is very much a project intended for my own educational benefit, while others may potentially find the odd detail useful.

Contents

1. Project code overview
2. DOS header
3. DOS stub and Rich header