Question

How to determine what DLL’s a binary depends on using programmatic methods?

To be clear, I am not trying to determine the DLL dependencies of the running exec, but of any arbitrary exec (that may be missing a required DLL). I’m looking for a solution to implement in a C/C++ application. This is something that needs to be done by my application at runtime and can’t be done by a third party app (like depends).

Answer 1

Take a look at the IMAGE_LOAD_FUNCTION API. It will return a pointer to a LOADED_IMAGE structure, which you can use to access the various sections of a PE file.

You can find some articles that describe how the structures are laid out here, and here. You can download the source code for the articles here.

I think this should give you everything you need.

Update:

I just downloaded the source code for the article. If you open up EXEDUMP.CPP and take a look at DumpImportsSection it should have the code you need.