Thursday, July 17, 2008

reverse engineering of Silverlight XAP files

by preishuber via Hannes Preishuber on 7/17/2008 5:50:00 PM

In my last post Michael Schwarz noticed  that search engine spiders can theoretically  index xap files.

Silverlight 2.0 creates a xap file where dll’s, images, videos and xml are included.

First step is to search in web for files with xap extension and download it. Then uncompress it with unzip algorithm ( eg rename to zip).

You will find a dll with the logic inside and several dll’s with librarys and a manifest file.

The you ca use (good old) reflector to disassemble the dll. The most interesting fact is that the original XAML file is included as resource.

You can then export ( save) the silder.xaml and open it with eg Expression Blend. Logic can be also taken from reflector which have the option to show it in VB.NET or C#.

Back to my beginning point. Till now I don’t know any search indexer which will do that.