reverse engineering of Silverlight XAP files

 

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.

image

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.

image

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.

Published Thursday, July 17, 2008 7:50 PM by preishuber
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Comments

# re: reverse engineering of Silverlight XAP files

Thursday, July 17, 2008 5:08 PM by wisecarver

I sure hope we can do something about this, and the Silverlight Spy app.

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# re: reverse engineering of Silverlight XAP files

Friday, July 18, 2008 3:22 AM by markvt

This is common for other files you run on websites, flash movies have the same problemm. I think however this should be changed if silverlight should become a big success in the enterprise world.

# re: reverse engineering of Silverlight XAP files

Friday, July 18, 2008 6:51 AM by paul.vencill

I see it as a good thing.  Hopefully, spiders will eventually catch on and content in SL can be indexed just like HTML so that you don't have to worry about killing your pagerank by putting content in a rich interface.

# re: reverse engineering of Silverlight XAP files

Tuesday, July 22, 2008 9:20 AM by Christian

once Silverlight has a decent market share (both on the clients' and the producers' side), search engines will care. Before that, they won't.

# re: reverse engineering of Silverlight XAP files

Tuesday, May 05, 2009 11:13 AM by Daniel Chazan

:-)

Good work man!!!!!

u helped me ...

10x  (t(h)enks :)

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