The Types Stream
Over the past few weeks, I've been continuing to investigate the structure of the Types stream (stream 2) in Microsoft PDB files with the help of Sven Schreiber's PDB parsing code . Some issues with getting approval to publish research came up at work, but I think they're mostly ironed out now, so I'm going to devote this entry to going through some of the trickier bits involved in parsing the Types stream. Some code also accompanies this entry: a python script to parse and print out the types contained in a stream. It works on streams that have alrady been extracted from a PDB file (see this earlier entry); if you don't have one around you can try it out on the Types stream from ntoskrnl.exe on Windows XP SP2. The Type Stream Header The types stream begins with a header that gives a few pieces of useful information. The first dword represents the version number, of the PDB file, and is generally determined by the version of the compiler that created the PDB file....