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Resource Tools - IE7 XML Source View Upgrade Part 1

2007 May 9, 4:15I read about text/xml URI fragment resolution a few months ago. I was interested to find another kind of fragment reference other than the text/html URI fragment but of course I didn't find an implementation in IE, Firefox, or Opera. I decided to see how much work would be required to implement this in IE.

In IE and Firefox when you open an XML file that doesn't have an XML stylesheet the XML source is rendered with syntax highlighting. In IE I also noticed that the gold bar appears when you open an XML file off of your local machine. To me this suggested that the XML source was being rendered as HTML which I assumed was produced by running an XSLT on the source XML file. If so, I figured I could modify the XSLT to implement text/xml URI fragments. I ran FileMon to see if iexplore.exe loaded an XSLT file when opening an XML file. Only the XML file and MSXML3.DLL were opened and no XSLTs were loaded as files. My next hope for modifying the XSLT was if it existed as a resource in MSXML3.DLL. I did a findstr on the DLL for SCRIPT and found an XSLT so I decided to check for resources in MSXML3.DLL. Unfortunately my previous resource viewer didn't work correctly so I decided to write my own.

I created resource tools to view and modify resources in Windows modules. The viewer outputs HTML with links to the individual resources of a module using the res URI scheme that's built into IE. The modifier is a simple command line tool that replaces or adds one resource at a time to a module.

Using these tools I found that the XSLT was stored as a resource in MSXML3.DLL. I'll talk more about the existing XSLT and the one I replaced it with next time.resource technical xml msxml res xslt xsl

New Shoes

2004 May 10, 10:37Looking around the Microsoft campus it was easy to tell people who were there for an interview from the programmers who worked there. All of the people who were dressed formally, a suit or tie was an obvious sign, were there for an interview. I spent my time between interviews talking to other over dressed people between interviews. The usual topics of conversation included name, city of origin, computer science background, and the crazy problems our interviewers had asked us. Going through these topics with one such person, who incidentally was the only woman I saw interviewing, I asked what school she was attending. She told me she was just finishing her Masters in Computer Science at [some college] and I told her where I was from. She then asked me, "You have your Doctorate in Computer Science?" "No," I said, "My Bachelors... I'm working on my Bachelors." "Oh," she said, "Well you look very mature." I'm fairly certain that's a first for me -- being told I look "very mature" that is. Unfortunately, at that point my tram showed up and I had to travel to a different building. Now I'm left wondering what made me look mature. It could have been the gel or the slacks or the tucked in shirt. The day previous while dressed casually, hanging out with my friend Jeannie, some of her friends thought I was her age, about eight years older. The common element between my two appearances were my new black dressy-ish shoes. Maybe its just that easy.