UIRibbon

[Fabian Maurer]

Hi Wine-Devel,

I'm currently working on a patchset to get UIRibbon to work, or at least to 
not crash the program.

I noticed that the ribbon xml files need to be compiled with a program called 
UICC.exe from the windows SDK, the resulting resources have some proprietary 
binary format. If we want to load and display a ribbon, we'll have to 
understand it.
Does anyone know about information on that, or is the only way to reverse 
engineer it?

Regards,
Fabian Maurer

[Nikolay Sivov]

On Fri, 28 Jul 2017 at 23:53, Fabian Maurer  wrote:
> Hi Wine-Devel,
>
> I'm currently working on a patchset to get UIRibbon to work, or at least to
> not crash the program.
>
> I noticed that the ribbon xml files need to be compiled with a program
> called
> UICC.exe from the windows SDK, the resulting resources have some
> proprietary
> binary format. If we want to load and display a ribbon, we'll have to
> understand it.

This sounds like a blocker to me, at this point at least. What are the
options for applications? Can you use raw xml too (this could be useful if
ribbon description is generated in runtime)?
> Does anyone know about information on that, or is the only way to reverse
> engineer it?

Does it use DirectUI thing or something similarly undocumented and unstable?
> Regards,
> Fabian Maurer

[Fabian Maurer]

> This sounds like a blocker to me, at this point at least. What are the
> options for applications? Can you use raw xml too (this could be useful if
> ribbon description is generated in runtime)?

AFAIK, no. The xml must be compiled by UICC.exe, and the binary embedded as 
resource. You can't really generate stuff at runtime, but the application can 
hide controls.
> Does it use DirectUI thing or something similarly undocumented and unstable?

Sorry, I never heard about DirectUI, so I don't know. But I doubt it since 
there is no need for any dlls that look directui related.
You can make ribbons work on wine by using "propsys.dll, uiribbon.dll, 
uiribbonres.dll, uxtheme.dll" from win7, and a hack for the built-in user32.

It's undocumented sure, I didn't find any information about it after hours of 
googling. I don't know if I'd call it unstable though, it works well across 
windows versions.

Luckily the UICC compiler works under wine (with msxml3 msxml6), so at least 
compiling is easily. If you want to see an example, I can provide one.

I already began poking around in the binary format, but I'm not very 
experienced with binary analysis and the ribbon information is fairly complex, 
too. And reversing an unknown format is always a bunch of work, I guess.

Regards,
Fabian Maurer