Articles, Best Practices, Considerations

Articles, Best Practices, Considerations
an ABC of sorts

This thread is intended to collect (and encourage you to write such Smile

) articles/threads that for some reason is worth reading. If you have any threads or articles that you think should be listed here don't be shy post a reply here with a short summary of the article and why you think it's good. (or if you're shy, just PM me instead, I usually don't bite that hard Wink

)

Note: While this thread resides under the Windows section the articles doesn't necessarily need to be directly related to windows programming (I might move the thread if the lists bellow become very generic, but for now it's mostly windows related). Especially the security section is by it's nature not just about one single OS or version thereof.

Contents

Tutorials for beginners
Software Security
Graphics Libraries
Problems
Related

Tutorials for beginners - we all had to learn to crawl first

Iczelion's Assembly Tutorial in FASM
Contains some of Iczelion's famous windows tutorials translaed to fasm syntax.
Examples
The examples hosted on this site, learning by examples. Also, don't forget to check out the examples included with the fasm download.

Software Security - because security is also about not crashing

This section is intended to list links to articles about (software) security, a concern for all programmers..

Drop Your Rights (XP application only)
A fasm port by revolution of MS' article Browsing the Web and Reading E-mail Safely as an Administrator. Basically an article about dropping privileges, a common practice in Unix/Linux software. (cf PrivSep and Privilege revocation) and Windows XP/Server 2003 SAFER.
Smashing The Stack For Fun And Profit
The effects of bad buffer/stack management. Buffer overflows, they can be avoided, yet they're still (iirc since sometime in the 80's) a very common vulnerability*. Good and secure practices can avoid or limit the impact of them. For instance, never trust user provided data (ask them for an (unspecified/signed) integer, what if they give you "-1"? Will your loop trash the stack or crash?). Do bounds checking, be paranoid about prinf-like functions (esp. the "%n" format). And always check the return value of malloc (etc) - an unchecked NULL pointer will at best just crash your program (which may be unacceptable as it can be a DoS-type failure, or leak information from unsafe core dumps, which are more or less raw dumps of the process memory after it crashed).
Managed code
Some times the answer to how to improve security is rewrite. Killing your darlings - possibly the hardest thing to do, it's ok to cry

*a quick terminology notice: vulnerability = something/a defect that might go undetected/never happen or cause an error (something that might be recoverable from) which may lead to a failure (e.g. program crash).

Also, a final quote from a guest lecturer: "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you" (or my take at it "if you're not paranoid about users, you've missed the point about security")

Graphics Libraries - For life in R² or R³
There are many libraries for graphics. DirectX, OpenGL, SDL or even aalib/libcaca.

DirectX
This is where your example could be.
OpenGL
- OpenGL includes for fasm
  Based on "standard gl.h, glext.h, glu.h, and wglext.h". These may be outdated (the OpenGL example in the windows bundle of fasm (Downloads) has it's own).
- First Person Camera
  An example of first person camera which also contains some sort of OpenGL framework.

Problems - just might be what you're looking for

Related - similar pages

About This Section
vid's collection of threads/links.
Windows Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
the predecessor of this thread. (contains some dead links)

No dead links above as of 2010-01-24 11:12. If you encounter a dead link above please notify me.