HelloWorldDriver Alternatives

HelloWorldDriver reviews and mentions

• A TLS 1.3 Stack Written in Visual Basic 6
  4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 May 2023

  The most impressive 'pushed beyond it's limits' code I've seen is The trick's VB6 kernel mode driver. Yep, really. VB6. Kernel mode. You have to strip out the MSVBVM60.dll dependency, which dramatically limits what language features you can use, but it's possible, albeit for 32bit Windows only, of course.

  https://www.vbforums.com/showthread.php?788179-VB6-Kernel-mo...

  Inspired by that, I made a similar 'hello world' type kernel mode driver and in addition to the VB6 version, made a twinBASIC version, which can compile to x64 and run on current Windows. twinBASIC has no runtime dependency, so you can use far more of the language features, supports cdecl for calling dbgprint, and it has native support for putting APIs into the IAT so no TLB dependency and overriding the entry point so no special hack for that.

  https://github.com/fafalone/HelloWorldDriver

  I'm not nearly as brilliant as The trick or wqweto to figure these things out to begin with, but it's so much fun taking the techniques of these legends and running with them. Although I did claim the title of first to create a realtime kernel ETW event tracer, a notoriously unfriendly API that requires multithreading (possible in VB6 thanks to The trick et al, natively supported in tB via API for now, language syntax soon).

• Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic
  5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Mar 2023

  I'm a big fan of twinBASIC, more successor than clone.

  It's working on full backwards compatibility with VB6 (and very, very close to it, even many complex UserControls work), with a lengthy list of new features (x64-- through compat. with VBA7 x64 syntax, multithreading (via API for now, native syntax soon), generics, overloading, Unicode-everything, defining interfaces/coclasses in language instead of TLBs, easily makes standard DLLs, Implements-Via syntax to extend classes, parameterized class constructors, can specify UDT packing, bitshift operators, inline initialization of vars, forms support modern image formats/transparency/alpha blending, AddressOf works on class members... well, the list goes on for quite some time: https://www.vbforums.com/showthread.php?890181-TwinBasic&p=5...

  One thing I'm sure lots of people here will find blasphemous, it lets you make kernel mode drivers, provided you stick to WDM (you could do this as a hack in VB6, but you had to strip the runtime dependency out-- which dramatically limited usefulness, not to mention no WOW64 for kernel mode. tB has no runtime dependency so all you have to do is avoid strings/variants/most but not all arrays, as those call user mode APIs behind the scenes). Proof of concept: https://github.com/fafalone/HelloWorldDriver

  Main downsides are that it's also like VB6 in being closed source/commercial (only restriction on the free version is a splash screen on x64 exes though, and won't have access to compiler optimizations or cross-platform compilation when they're implemented; no restriction on commercial use or royalties), but the creator seems amenable to changing that if it's viable, and since we've had 20 years of no community stepping up for something like this, it's just a practical matter that for one person to do it they'd need income as it's a major undertaking, not something you can do as a hobby with full time employment doing something else, at least if it's going to get done in years instead of decades (*cough* Radbasic, which has made near zero progress after being announced around the same time, and is barely a step above Hello World support).

• When was the last time you wrote this piece of code?
  1 project | /r/ProgrammerHumor | 5 Feb 2023

  Yes, really.

• Is it possible to prevent copying and deletion of files in a directory using coding?
  1 project | /r/vba | 24 Jan 2023

  To prevent them beforehand reliably would be extraordinarily difficult in VBA... you could hook the low level APIs called to perform those operations, but that's no easy task. A file system minifilter driver is the ideal way to go about it, but as that's kernel mode programming you couldn't do it in VBA, you could only do it with great difficulty in VB6 (and only if you had 32bit Windows), and slightly less but still extreme difficulty using the x64 VBA language using twinBASIC, which includes features to make kernel mode drivers (here's a proof-of-concept hello world driver, written with the VBA 64bit language, capable of running on 64bit Windows 10/11). I'm currently working on a proof of concept minifilter driver for just such an application, but since Microsoft's minifilter driver samples don't actually work even when compiled unchanged from their C source, it's quite challenging.

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