Hi Huw, Hi Nikolay,

thanks for the quick response!

> I suspect how you write the parser will depend to some extent on the

> format of the binary blob itself, so I'd suggest getting a good

> understanding of that before you attack the coding.

Actually, I can do both at the same time. I'm working with a tool called Kaitai Struct, basically I'm writing the specification and generate a parser from that. Though I needed to roll my own C-generator, for better or worse.

> If it turns out to basically be a

> binary representation of xml, then it may be appropriate to look at an

> xml parser (e.g. dlls/ntdll/actct.x).

I'm afraid it's most likely not that simple. The compiler does a lot of rearranging the data, it's not much like the original XML anymore.

> Once you start coding, you could send the outline parser or tests to

> wine-devel as an RFC. The good news is that figuring out the format

> of the blob is likely to take much longer than actually coding, so any

> false steps that you might make are not going to affect the overall

> effort too much.

That's probably very true.

FWIW, I have the complete project on github. The parser is here: https://github.com/DarkShadow44/UIRibbon-Reversing/blob/master/test/tests/UIRibbon/parser_uiribbon.c

Would that code style be okay?

As said, this is generated from the file definition format I'm creating. And since I generate this with a small C# program (also part of this repo), I can adjust the code as needed.

> Another approach could be to implement the tool that creates such blobs,

> MS build tools must have something for that. This way you can start with

> minimal possible ribbon description, then tickle input and see what

> comes up in the blob.

Yes, there is UICC.exe to turn a xml into a blob. I use that to reverse engineer the format - change the xml, see how the blob changes. Is that what you mean?

I don't quite understand why I would want to implement the tools that creates the blob though, that needs to do a lot of validation that isn't really needed to 'just' decode the blob.

> I don't know if activation context code is useful for that, it does not

> use binary xml representation, your case could be closer xaml/baml.Maybe

> you can check WPF opensource project for that, it supposed to provide

> Xaml implementation. (WPF has its own Ribbon control by the way,

> probably separate from win32 one).

Yeah, I looked into baml - but to me it looks completely different. A shame really, would have made it a lot easier.

Regards,

Fabian Maurer