VS2012 Crashes Loading Resource File with Byte Array - crash

I used to use VS2010, which had no trouble loading System.Byte[] (byte array) from a resource file, however now when I open the same resource file with Visual Studio 2012 (VS2012) crashes.
Here is a format copied from the Resources.resx file:
<data name="BYTEARRAY_1" type="System.Byte[], mscorlib">
<value>
e1xydGYxXGFuc2lcYW5zaWNwZzEyNTJcZGVmZjBcZGVmb
c1xmcHJxMlxmY2hhcnNldDAgQXJpYWw7fXtcZjFcZnJvb
...
NCAqKioqKioqKioqKioqKioqKioqKioqKioqKipccGFy
My question is what is wrong and how do I fix it? What is the proper format now?
A second question is how do I add a new byte array to a resource file. I see the capability to insert images, strings, files, and icon, just not a byte array.
Thanks in advance

The solution that I took was to recode and simply insert a file as a resource. Files as a resource can load as a byte array. It was a bit of work, but at least files are easier to maintain.
Microsoft still has a bug, which they introduced in Visual Studio 2012 (VS2012), but their bug actually served me well.

Related

Migrating a string table (binary .res file) from VB6 to VB.NET

I have to port an old VB6 program to VB.NET and stumbled across an old ".res" (Resource) file, which is stored in binary format. Using VS 2013, I can embed that file into my .NET project, and VS shows me that it contains simply a string table.
The problem is, I cannnot figure out how to bring those res file into a more modern text format, or how to load the strings directly from the res file. I linked file to my application es an embedded resource, but all my atttempts to use VB6.LoadResString from the "Visual Basic Compatibility library" lead to an exception, showing the key was not found.
Furthermore, it seems VS does not allow me to copy/paste the string table into a text file, at least, not at a whole. Actually, it allows me to copy/paste one string after another, but as you can imagine, that is extremely cumbersome and error-prone. That is why I am looking for a better solution. Any ideas?
There is a functional VB6 Class for doing this at:
ResDecomp Class Decompiles RES Files
Sample programs are included, one of them a sort of "viewer" and the other just extracts RT_STRING resource strings to an XML document. You could easily change the latter to dump the string values to a text file, database, etc. instead.
Embed the .res file to a simple VB6 program which loops from min to the max ID and write out the strings to a text file using LoadResString (error trap for missing IDs).

VisualStudio 2013 weird compile issues

Issue
I'm having some really odd compile issues using Visual Studio 2013 and it's really disrupting my teams workflow.
The issue is hard to explain but I will provide screen shots and code snippets to help people understand the problems we are facing.
We have a project that we recently moved to VisualStudio 2013 from 2010 and upgraded it to .Net 4.5, the project is a ASP.net Web Forms project.
The code compiles and runs but oddly when I change any of the class files sometimes even just adding a comment 'Test Comment it fails to compile.
The errors shown in the error window are all wierd and the IntelliSense shows errors in the wrong place, some of the errors are even completly off. An example is _To is not defined in the line Dim _Town as String or in the same line 'ring' is not defined which is oviously part of the word String
ScreenShots
Here are some of the errors after I added the failing code at line 44 and then commented it out and re-compiled
What I've tried
I've tried to change the files line endings and make sure they are all Windows CR+LF, I've tried snooping in the build output nothing I can really see to help me.
I even brung the solution down from source control on another machine to test and it had the same issue. It didn't actually compile properly at all on the new machine but I don't know yet if these two issues are related.
I had the same issue as yours, and also the same scenario (I had upgraded a very old VB.NET project to a 2013 project).
The issue seem to be related to file encoding. I don't know the exact cause, but it might be having multiple files with different encoding (In my case, some files were ANSI, other files were UTF-8 w/ BOM).
If you aren't sure about having files with different encoding, open them in Notepad++. You should see the file encoding in the bottom-right corner.
At first, I have convert the offending file to ANSI to see if this will resolve the problem. I opened the offending file in Notepad++, selected Encoding-Convert to ANSI, Saved, Encoding->Encode In UTF-8 without BOM, Saved and Reloaded the file in VS. Now the project compile successfully.
However, I didn't want to do this every time I changed the file, (since VS convert it back to UTF8), therefore I copied all the old files (In my case they were 4 files only) to a temporary directory, deleted the files from VS and created new files with the same name, and I copy/pasted the content into each file. Now all my files are in UTF8, and I am no longer having this issue.
The solution is to either convert your files to ANSI as UTF8, or convert them to UTF8 (This seems to be the default encoding for newly created files in Visual Studio, so I suggest converting them to UTF8)
If you have a lot of files I think you can try to convert them to UTF8 using Notepad++.
Regards.

how to edit dll archives?

okay, so i dont really know much about DLLs. but i need to edit some of them. ones that seem like archive files.
such as: firefox's xul.dll, windows/twain_32.dll
when i tried to open them in .NET Reflector, it couldnt open them. and a really downvoted answer on here made me realize they can be opened with 7zip, and seem to have files inside.
i can extract the files, but cant edit the dll, and i dont know how to create a dll like this. i dont have visual c++ or basic, and i dont know if i could do this with them.
thank you in advance, or how to say
A dll file usually contains program code (that is: binary code you can not easily understand). Some dll files may also contain resources, which can be sometimes edited with a resource editor (such as ResourceHacker).
dll files are no archives and their primary usage does not include holding files. Resources normally are rather small data elements such as icons.
Edit: If you open a dll file in 7zip, you will see some virtual files (which are no real files but sections of the binary object file, see symbol table and relocation table in object file for example) along with a virtual folder .rscs (abbreviation for "resources") that contains the mentioned resources you can edit with a resource editor. Again, remember these are not files. 7zip only displays them in a way you may think of files.
The object code inside of .text, .data and .reloc contains binary program code and initialization data along with the reallocation table. It makes no sense to edit those information unless you use a disassembler, can understand the generated assembler code, know about the pitfalls of disassembling, make senseful changes and are able to reassemble the code.
Not that even if you did so, you'd apply the disassembler to the whole object file instead of single sections.

How to compare and find the differences between two XML files in cocoa?

This is a bit of a two part question, for working with 40mb xml files.
• What’s a reasonable size to store in memory for a program running continually in the background?
• How to find what has changed in an XML file.
So on the first read the XML is loaded into NSData, then uploaded to the server.
Now instead of uploading a 40mb XML every time it changes, I would prefer to upload a “delta” file containing only what has changed. The program would monitor the file for change, and activate when it’s been modified. From what I can see, I would need to parse an old version of the xml file and parse the modified xml file, then compare them? Is it unreasonable to store 80mb in memory like this every time the file is modified?. Now I’m assuming that this has to be done with a DOM parser because I can’t see how you could compare two files like that with a SAX parser since it only has part of the file stored?
I'm a newbie at this so any help would be appreciated!
To compare two files:
There are many ways to do, (As file is to be considered, I may not be correct):
sdiff file1.xml file2.xml A unix command
You can use this command with apple script.
-[NSFileManager contentsEqualAtPath:andPath:]
This method checks to see if two files at given path are the same file, then compares their size, and finally compares their contents.
For other part:
What size is considered for background process, I dont think so, for an application it matters. You can save these into temporary files. Even safari uses 130+ MB as you can easily check through Activity monitor.
NSXMLParser ended up being the most useful for this

CGZIPLibrary.dll not compressing files

HI, I am using CGZipLibrary.dll in my code for zipping the files. A .zip file is being created but the file is not getting compressed. The original file and the .zip file are of same size.
Please provide some suggestions. Thanks in advance.
CGZipLibrary.dll... that's a rather old library if my memory is serving me right, I remember using it (or some other library with a similary name) in some old VB6 projects, and I had to update it because it had some problems when compressing folder structures. I may have the updated library lying somewhere around.
For .Net there are better alternatives like SharpZipLib and DotNetZip. I see the question is tagged with VB6 as well... if you need to use the library from VB6, from what I know, DotNetZip is marked as visible for COM, so you should be able to use it as well, although haven't tried it myself.