images added into resx file - c#

This has been a interesting file for me.
I found that ,whenever a image is added to this ,the image is actually converted into bytes and stored as data rather than a file.
I just want to know the benefit of this?also will be there be chances of bytes getting curropted when the file is put into version control(Most unlikely)

A file is nothing else but data written to disk and usually contains the actual data plus some header information (e.g. image type, so you know how to interprete the data). If it helps you understand it, think of the resx file as a "mini" file system from which the image data can be retrieved.
If put in version control, resx files should be no problem.

You might want to take a look at ResourceManager.

Related

How do I get the file version from bytes or stream?

I get the file version this way:
var fileVersion = FileVersionInfo.GetVersionInfo(path).FileVersion
But this option is not suitable for me, since I have to use a non-native tool to get the file that returns the stream. Can I get the file version from this stream or from an array of bytes?
Unfortunately, you cant do this directly
you should
Write the file to disk in some sort of temporary location
Read the version from the file on disk
Delete the file
In short, no, what you want is not possible with the current tools. The problem is that, as you've noticed, FileVersionInfo.GetVersionInfo relies on a physical file to be present on disk. If you look at its internals, you'll see that all it really does is to delegate to the Windows API which does the real work, precisely in the GetFileVersionInfo function, which in turn also takes a file name as parameter, so it's only designed to operate from the filesystem.
A possible workaround would be to drop a temp file with the binary you got from your stream, get the version info you need, then delete the file.
Another option would be to look for a library that can parse in-memory exe/dll files and extract the relevant details directly from there.

json files in a resx are binary instead of text

I have some test data (json files) that I am using while testing some software. It is static data and I need the tests to run locally and on build machines that I don't have to much control of. In order to get uniform access to the test data (json files) I have put them into a RESX file and that is working nicely except that I had to change the extension of the file from .json to .txt.
If I left it as .json it was added to the resx file as a "Binary" instead of "Text File". This by itself wasn't the end of the road... I simply read out the bits and converted it back to a string but when I tried to deserialize the string (after the conversion from byte[]) I got an exception for unexpected char at position 0 line 0.
The only real downside to the "txt" extension is that I loose the color coding in the IDE for a JSON file.
Is there a way to force the RESX to treat the .json extension as a "Text File"?
Maybe it's too late, but there is a very simple method to achieve what you want. Just select the desired file in the resources window, hit F4 or go to the Properties and select proper FileType there. It has two options: binary and text.
A colleague of mine just encountered a similar issue with a .cshtml file. The actual content of the file didn't seem to matter when we renamed the file to have an extension that was known to work caused it to add as text.
Also, Axm's suggestion worked to fix it, but we initially missed it because you can't right-click on the resource and select properties.

How to Save a Binary Representation to file

I have the following textual binary representation: "0x255044462D312E340D0A25FFFFFFF..."
I know it's a pdf.
I know it's the textual represantation from a sql server column (image data type).
But im lost to find out how to save this binary to a pdf file on my disk and view the content.
Maybe someone can hint me in the right direction.
Best Regards and Thanks in Advance
You're correct that it is a PDF file (at least it masquerades like on. You have hexadecimally encoded bytes; the first read:
255044462D312E340D0A
%PDF-1.4<CR><LF>
So you appear to have a PDF 1.4 string.
Just take two characters from the string, treat them as hex, convert them to the correct byte and write them to a file. Write binary, not textually (you don't want to add additional line-breaks in there, PDF is too binary to let that work.
(I did the conversion using this site: http://www.dolcevie.com/js/converter.html)
I'm not sure what database you are working with or how you are getting your string that you have above.
Many databases allow you to save binary data as a blob or some other byte array type. I believe in MSSQL this is called an "image" but I am not 100% on that. I would start by looking into the two following links in order. The first link talks about how to pull byte array data from a database. The example is in Visual Basic but should be easily changed to C# if that is what you are using.
The second link contains an example of how to save that byte array data to the file system.
I would also suggest posting some of the code you have tried as well so that the community may comment and point out areas you possibly had misunderstandings on.
1.) http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308042
2.) Save and load MemoryStream to/from a file
http://www.pdfsharp.com/PDFsharp/ can read in binary data and you can call .Save() and it will make the PDF file to disk for you.

What's the best structure to conserve file related information?

I am building an interface whose primary function would be to act as a file renaming tool (the underlying task here is to manually classify each file within a folder according to rules that describe their content). So far, I have implemented a customized file explorer and a preview window for the files.
I now have to find a way to inform a user if a file has already been renamed (this will show up in the file explorer's listView). The program should be able to read as well as modify that state as the files are renamed. I simply do not know what method is optimal to save this kind of information, as I am not fully used to C#'s potential yet. My initial solution involved text files, but again, I do not know if there should be only one text file for all files and folders or simply a text file per folder indicating the state of its contained items.
A colleague suggested that I use an Excel spreadsheet and then simply import the row or columns corresponding to my query. I tried to find more direct data structures, but again I would feel a lot more comfortable with some outside opinion.
So, what do you think would be the best way to store this kind of data?
PS: There are many thousands of files, all of them TIFF images, located on a remote server to which I have complete access.
I'm not sure what you're asking for, but if you simply want to keep some file's information such as name, date, size etc. you could use the FileInfo class. It is marked as serializable, so that you could easily write an array of them in an xml file by invoking the serialize method of an XmlSerializer.
I am not sure I understand you question. But what I gather you want to basically store the meta-data regarding each file. If this is the case I could make two suggestions.
Store the meta-data in a simple XML file. One XML file per folder if you have multiple folders, the XML file could be a hidden file. Then your custom application can load the file if it exists when you navigate to the folder and present the data to the user.
If you are using NTFS and you know this will always be the case, you can store the meta-data for the file in a file stream. This is not a .NET stream, but a extra stream of data that can be store and moved around with each file without impacting the actual files content. The nice thin about this is that no matter where you move the file, the meta-data will move with the file, as long as it is still on NTFS
Here is more info on the file streams
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa364404(VS.85).aspx
You could create an object oriented structure and then serialize the root object to a binary file or to an XML file. You could represent just about any structure this way, so you wouldn't have to struggle with the
I do not know if there should be only one text file for all files and folders or simply a text file per folder indicating the state of its contained items.
design issues. You would just have one file containing all of the metadata that you need to store. If you want speedier opening/saving and smaller size, go with binary, and if you want something that other people could open and view and potentially write their own software against, you can use XML.
There's lots of variations on how to do this, but to get you started here is one article from a quick Google:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/objserial.aspx

Is there an easy way to determine the type of a file without knowing the file's extension?

I have a table with a binary column which stores files of a number of different possible filetypes (PDF, BMP, JPEG, WAV, MP3, DOC, MPEG, AVI etc.), but no columns that store either the name or the type of the original file. Is there any easy way for me to process these rows and determine the type of each file stored in the binary column? Preferably it would be a utility that only reads the file headers, so that I don't have to fully extract each file to determine its type.
Clarification: I know that the approach here involves reading just the beginning of each file. I'm looking for a good resource (aka links) that can do this for me without too much fuss. Thanks.
Also, just C#/.NET on Windows, please. I'm not using Linux and can't use Cygwin (doesn't work on Windows CE, among other reasons).
you can use these tools to find the file format.
File Analyser
http://www.softpedia.com/get/Programming/Other-Programming-Files/File-Analyzer.shtml
What Format
http://www.jozy.nl/whatfmt.html
PE file format analyser
http://peid.has.it/
This website may be helpful for you.
http://mark0.net/onlinetrid.aspx
Note:
i have included the download links to make sure that you are getting the right tool name and information.
please verify the source before you download them.
i have used a tool in the past i think it is File Analyser, which will tell you the closest match.
happy tooling.
This is not a complete answer, but a place to start would be a "magic numbers" library. This examines the first few bytes of a file to determine a "magic number", which is compared against a known list of them. This is (at least part) of how the file command on Linux systems works.
Someone else asked a similar question and posted the code used to do exactly this. You should be able to take what is posted here, and slightly modify it so that it pulls from your database.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58510
In addition to that, it looks like someone has written a library based off of magic numbers to do this, however, it looks like the site requires registration, and some form of alternate access in order to download this lirbary. The documentation is avaliable for free without registration, that may be helpful.
http://software.topcoder.com/catalog/c_component.jsp?comp=13249160&ver=2
The easiest way I know is to use file command that it is also available in Windows with Cygwin .
A lot of filetypes have well defined headers that begin the file. You could check the first few bytes to check to see how the file begins.
Easiest way to do this would be through access to a *nix (or cygwin) system that has the 'file' command:
$ file visitors.*
visitors.html: HTML document text
visitors.png: PNG image data, 5360 x 2819, 8-bit colormap, non-interlaced
You could write a C# application that piped the first X bytes of each binary column to the file command (using - as the file name)
You need to use some p/invoke interop code to call the SHGetFileInfo method from the Win32 API. This article may also help.

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