From the Intro of the document:

"The purpose of this document is to familiarize or refresh the reader with the
techniques used to write reliable shellcode for Windows. The reader is expected
to be familiar with IA32 assembly on at least a conceptual level. It is also
recommended that the reader take some time to review some of the items in the
bibliography. Aside from that, the only other requirement is the desire to learn.
Many portions of this document have been covered elsewhere before but, to
the author’s satisfaction, have not been compiled into an easily understandable
format for beginners and tinkerers alike. For this reason the author hopes that
the reader walks away with a more centralized point of reference with regards
to the topic of Windows shellcode.

This document will focus both on Windows 9x and Windows NT based versions
with more emphasis on the latter.

The tool used to compile the assembly displayed in this document is cl.exe
as distributed with Microsoft’s Visual Studio suite. With cl.exe, one should
make use of the inline assembler functionality when attempting to compile the
assembly. Also, one can likely use masm or other assemblers that support intelstyle
assembly as well if one does not have access to cl.exe.
Finally, all of the shellcode in this document can be found athttp://www.hick.
org/code/skape/shellcode/win32."

Original Link: www.hick.org/code/skape/papers/win32-shellcode.pdf