Extract an RT_RCDATA section from a Win32 executable (preferably in C#)?

Question

How do you extract an RT_RCDATA section from a Win32 executable (preferably in C#)?

The only way I know how to do this currently is opening up the EXE in Visual Studio. I'd love to be able to do this entirely in C# if possible.

Thanks!

Answer 1

I assume that you are trying to read a resource of type RCDATA from an executable (be aware that "executable section" means a different thing - it refers to the .text, .data, .rdata, etc parts of the PE file). If you want to read it from the current assembly, here is a tutorial showing how: Accessing Embedded Resources using GetManifestResourceStream, using the GetManifestResourceNames and GetManifestResourceStream methods.

If you don't want to read it from the current executable, you can use a method similar to the one shown here.

These methods have the advantage over PInvoke that they are 100% .NET and you don't have to fiddle with marshaling the arguments to/from platform data types and making sure that you validated all the return values.