alt Hacker NewsYeah only the DOS façade of Windows NT is well known. Under that skin lurks some pretty wild late-1980s concepts. One of the core things to understand is that a lot of the features are based on a reverse map of GUIDs to various actions, and resolution of these map entries pervades the UI. That's why you can put {hexspew} as the name of a shortcut on the Windows desktop and have it magically become a deep link to some feature that Windows doesn't otherwise let you create a shortcut to, and also why you can just add things to the control panel which doesn't seem like it would be an intentional feature. And these actions can be named symbols inside DLLs, so they can do literally anything the OS is capable of doing. This is also why Windows has always been ground zero for malware.
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Those GUIDs aren't related to NT kernel but Windows Explorer and its COM-based component system. They were introduced with Windows 95, IIRC.
>so they can do literally anything the OS is capable of doing
Yea, over the years someone thought of something they wanted to do and then did it without a systematic consideration of what that level of power meant, especially as multi-user network connectivity and untrusted data became the norm.
That sounds fun. Do you have a link or and example “hexspew”