Generating a PE format executable

Question

I'm trying to generate a PE format executable; I'm at the stage where I have something that dumpbin is happy with, and as far as I can tell is not materially different from an empty program linked with Microsoft's linker, but Windows still rejects it: PE file - what's missing?

If I had some algorithm for generating a valid PE file, maybe I could hill climb from there. Here's what I've found so far:

• There's plenty of documentation, sample code and tools for reading PE files, as opposed to generating them from scratch.

• PE Bliss lists generation among its features, but won't compile.

• Sample assembly language templates for PE file generation concentrate on minimizing size. The most promising looking one generates a file that Windows rejects even though as far as I can see it should be accepted; the one I found that did work, ironically, generates a file that Windows accepts even though as far as I can see it should be rejected, since almost every nominally essential component is missing or malformed.

Is there any sample code available that generates a correct PE file?

Answer 1

Here's the classic page about generating PE from scratch:

http://www.phreedom.org/research/tinype

As for the generic list of required/optional parts, see corkami page on the PE format:

http://code.google.com/p/corkami/wiki/PE

See also the code tree for many examples of small PE files, generated completely from scratch.