| After finishing the manuscript of my first book, Developing LDAP and ADSI Clients for Microsoft Exchange (Schreiber 2000) in October 1999,1 was honestly convinced for some time that I would never write a book again. Well, this phase didn't last long, as the pages you are reading right now prove. Actually, I was already starting to think about writing another book as early as November 1999 while I was playing around with the latest release candidate of Microsoft Windows 2000. Examining the kernel and its interfaces and data structures, I was very pleased to find that this operating system—despite its ugly name that reminded me too much of Windows 95 and 98—was still a good old Windows NT.
Poking around in the binary code of operating systems has always been one of my favorite pastimes. Just a couple of weeks before I had the idea to write this book, my article "Inside Windows NT System Data" (Schreiber 1999), showing how to retrieve internal system data by means of the undocumented kernel API function tQuerySystemInformation(), had been published in Dr. Dobb's Journal. The preparatory research to this article left me with a huge amount of unpublished material that longed for being printed somewhere, and so I yelled: "Hey, how about a book about Windows 2000 Internals?" Because of the obvious similarities between Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000, plus my pile of interesting undocumented information too valuable to be buried, this seemed to be a great idea, and I am proud that this idea took the physical form of the book you are holding in your hands. While transforming the stuff I had Collected into something that was readable by other people, I discovered lots of other interesting things, so this book also features a great deal of brand-new material that I hadn't planned to include beforehand.
This book deliberately does not attempt to give a broad overview of the architecture of the Windows 2000 kernel, although it discusses parts of it in some chapters. If you are looking for such information, see Inside Windows 2000 (Solomon and Russinovich 2000) instead, which takes a very general and theoretical approach to the Windows 2000 internals. Neither Inside Windows 2000 nor the Undocumented Windows 2000 Secrets: A Programmers Cookbook Windows NT/2000 Native API Reference (Nebbett 2000) provide practical code examples and full-featured sample applications that interact live with the system contains reprinted code samples in abundance, accompanying the Windows 2000 concepts and features under discussion. The companion CD contains all of this code in ready-to-run applications that you can extend, tear to shreds for use in other applications, or simply use as is.
About the Author Sven B. Schreiber is a practicing systems programmer, working for a large corporation in Nürnberg, Germany. He has authored several technical articles for Dr. Dobbs Journal, Windows Developers Journal, and others. |