Software Security - PREfast project

Installing PREfast

PREfast is included in some (but not all) versions of Visual Studio. As Visual Studio is a huge download, and the version of PREfast they include and the syntax for SAL used can vary, we provide two simple ways to use PREfast from the command line:

from the Windows command line
from the Linux command line using wine

Windows command line

Due to possible distribution restrictions, the link to this archive will be provided by e-mail.

To use, just unzip into some directory. Now start the command-line (i.e. Run... -> cmd) and navigate to the directory. Just run prefast.bat to run PREfast over the exercise file, or prefast.bat FILENAME if you renamed the exercise file.

Wine on Linux command line

PREfast can be run on Unix/Linux using wine. Install wine using your systems package manager or download and install it manually from its website.

Unpack the TAR.GZ archive - again the link is provided by e-mail. Now, on the command-line go to this directory and use ./prefast to check the exercise file or ./prefast FILENAME if you renamed the file.

Wine may (will?) complain about a non-existent directory C:\users\pim\Temp. To fix that

you could try making a symlink YOUR_PREFAST_DIR/dotwine/drive_c/users/pim, where YOUR_PREFAST_DIR is your PREfast directory, and make this link poins to YOUR_PREFAST_DIR/dotwine/drive_c/users/YOUR_LINUX_USERNAME/
create a directory named 'Temp' under 'dotwine/drive_c/users/pim/'. You can use command 'mkdir -p dotwine/drive_c/users/pim/Temp' by running it under the 'PREfast_v9.0_under_wine' directory
Edit 'dotwine/user.reg' and change the occurrences of 'pim' string to your Linux user name. The lines 148 and 149 are those setting the environment variable for your TEMP directory, which must exist for the compiler 'cl.exe' to run.

Michal reported he also had to install the msxml3 library (using winetricks and customized prefix pointing to the "dotwine" directory)