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  Copyright © 1996-1998 Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell

  Last Updated,January 2, 1998
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     Introduction  WinObj is a must-have tool if you are a system
                   administrator concerned about security, a developer
                   tracking down object-related problems, or just curious
                   about the Object Manager namespace.

                   WinObj is a 32-bit Windows NT program that uses the
                   native Windows NT API (provided by NTDLL.DLL) to
                   access and display information on the NT Object
                   Manager's name space. Winobj may seem similar to the
                   Microsoft SDK's program of the same name, but the SDK
                   version suffers from numerous significant bugs that
                   prevent it from displaying accurate information (e.g.
                   its handle and reference counting information
                   aretotally broken). In addition, our WinObj
                   understands many more object types. Finally, Version
                   2.0 of our WinObj has user-interface enhancements,
                   knows how to open device objects, and will let you
                   view and change object security information using
                   native NT security editors.

                   Source code for WinObj 1.0 is available on the Dr.
                   Dobb's Journal NTInternals CD-ROM.

     Installation  There is no device driver component to WinObj, so you
          and Use  can run it like any Win32 program.

    Sample Screen  This is a screenshot of WinObj browsing the Object
             Shot  Manager namespace.

     How It Works  The Object Manager is in charge of managing NT
                   objects. As part of this responsibility, it maintains
                   an internal namespace where various operating system
                   components, device drivers and Win32 programs can
                   store and lookup objects. The native NT API provides
                   routines that allow user-mode programs to browse the
                   namespace and query the status of objects located
                   there, but the interfaces are undocumented.

             More  Helen Custer's Inside Windows NT provides a good
      Information  overview of the Object Manager name space, and Mark's
                   October 1997 Windows NT Magazine column, "Inside the
                   Object Manager", is (of course) an excellent overview.

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                           Download Winobj (26KB)

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