Database Info

SQL CE 3.5 - First App

I'm working on developing my first WM 6 App using SQL CE 3.5 . I'm sure there are other apps out there that do what mine does, but I'm just wanting the experience of developing it.
I'm working on a fairly simple app to track gas mileage and such. But, for some reason, whenever I debug it, the app can't seem to find the database file. I get an error saying: "The database file cannot be found. Check the path to the database. [ Data Source = .\GasTrackerDB.sdf ]"
I can browse with file explorer on the device and find the database in the same directory as the deployed application, so I'm not really sure where to go from here..
I'm doing everything through the IDE, so all of the code is generated for me to connect to the database.
Anybody experienced enough to help me troubleshoot this stupid problem?

i have been looking for an app that does the same thing as the one you are working on.
when it is finished please pm me. i wish i knew more programing, if i did i would help you.

Try
Code:
string database = string.Format(@"{0}\GasTrackerDB.sdf", GetApplicationPath());
public static string GetApplicationPath()
{
string path = System.IO.Path.GetDirectoryName(System.Reflection.Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().GetName().CodeBase);
return path;
}

I did figure it out after messing around with it. I think it has to do with the way VS2008 deploys the app on the emulator...
When I hard-code the path to the database file, it works. So, my app will just have to be installed on the local device and not the SD card

Don't hard-code the path! The method GetApplicationPath() returns the application path. This is also important when installing on OS with different language.

heliosdev said:
Don't hard-code the path! The method GetApplicationPath() returns the application path. This is also important when installing on OS with different language.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
How is that possible when the Connection String was generated by the IDE? Here's what the .xsd says:
Code:
<Connection ConnectionStringObject="Data Source=\program files\gastracker\GasTrackerDB.sdf" IsAppSettingsProperty="false" Modifier="Assembly" Name="GasTrackerDBConnectionString" ParameterPrefix="@" Provider="Microsoft.SqlServerCe.Client.3.5" />

On application start create the connection string "Data Source = " + database (like post #3)
This connection string can then be passed wherever you need to connect to the database.

That's the problem.. the IDE created all the stuff for the connection string and I don't know enough about it to create everything needed manually.

How do you connect to the db? What are you calling for retrieving data from db? How do you insert data to the db? All these actions need an object which somehow knows the connectionstring. And this string can/must be changed.

Hmm.. That doesn't seem to be a valid function name. I'm using .NET CF 3.5 .I'll keep looking.

Well, I wrote my own function to get the execution path, but I still can't figure out how to modify the connection string at runtime.
This crap is ridiculous. I don't understand why it doesn't "just work" when I let the IDE do everything...

Well, I FINALLY made it work.. i ended up going through the xsd file and changing all the code that creates queries. I had to replace every instance of:
Code:
CType(Me._commandCollection(0), Global.System.Data.SqlServerCe.SqlCeCommand).Connection = New Global.System.Data.SqlServerCe.SqlCeConnection("Data Source=.\GasTrackerDB.sdf;")
With:
Code:
CType(Me._commandCollection(0), Global.System.Data.SqlServerCe.SqlCeCommand).Connection = New Global.System.Data.SqlServerCe.SqlCeConnection("Data Source=" & GetAppPath() & "\GasTrackerDB.sdf;")
That had to be done for every one of my queries created through the designer. Thankfully I only had 5!

Great! Keep in mind that changes in generated code can get lost when the ide is recreating the code. Just keep an eye on it when doing changes in this area!

heliosdev said:
Great! Keep in mind that changes in generated code can get lost when the ide is recreating the code. Just keep an eye on it when doing changes in this area!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yeah, I already ran into that one If it gets to be too much of a pain, I'll see if I can create some sort of compile time script to do a find and replace.. But I haven't spent enough time going back and fixing it yet

go to
http://www.connectionstrings.com/
They have everything you need to build your connection string. From my experience, it's okay to let the IDE build everything EXCEPT the connection string....

VB.net How to change images in an imagebox with code?

As the title suggests, I use Visual Basic and was wondering how to change what image is shown in an imagebox through code?
Most of the suggestions google found me only work with the normal .net framework, not the compact version >.<
Any ideas anyone?

The following code will change it.
Code:
pictureBox1.Image = new Bitmap("\\windows\\bt_tran.bmp");
I only code in C#, but in this case the code is almost identical for VB and C#
VB: Use single slashes in the pathname, and drop the C# end of line character ';'
Insert your pathname in the function.
Note that the 'Image' property is itself an 'Image' object, you can't just stuff a path to your file in it, as you do when it is created in design mode. The path is a string, the object types won't match, and the compiler will throw it out. You have to create a new image from the pathname first and pass it that instead.
The pathname must exist on the emulator or on your device, or it will throw an error. Don't make the mistake of referring to a file on your PC, your device can't see it.

Cheers
You have no idea how helpful you are lol

[Q] Problems in editing framework

I'm recently trying to edit my framework with this mod
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1916094
Well actually the steps in that thread are very simple, but since I'm trying to apply that to my Xperia Ray so it must have slightly different steps
What I want to ask :
- In framework/res, I found drawable-.........( mdpi,hdmpi,ldpi,etc.). If I'm going to replace the .9png's picture in there, should I make the picture as same as the original picture dimension? I'm using Dev-Drawable app in the Play Store ( it makes picture to drawable- hdpi,mdpi,etc. ), the result of using it is it gives me the mdpi version of the picture but with different dimesion from the original picture.
- I found errors and it says that I have errors in the /res/values/public.xml
I found this :
Code:
Don't do that! :) I think I should explain the purpose of public.xml file in the project wiki, because many people are confused. Note that you don't need this file when you build an apk from sources and apktool building mechanisms are very similar, so guess what: you could remove this file from decoded application and apktool will rebuild it without any problems. I had a reason why to generate public.xml - it's a feature, not a bug! ;)
Well, the reason is: there may be references to resources in the application code. If resources ids will change after build, then code will reference different resources than in original apk. public.xml file gives us sureness that resources will get same ids after build - it's the only one reason to use this file. And you want to manually modify these ids ;)
Adding or removing new resources is somewhat tricky. Yeah, I should write about that in the wiki.
You could remove any line from public.xml (even making a "hole" in the ids) at any moment, but you must be sure, that resource isn't referenced in the code.
There is never much sense in modifying ids in public.xml, because then modified lines lose their purpose.
If you want to add new resources, e.g. drawables and use them in the XML files you don't have to change anything in the public.xml file.
If you want to add new resources and use them in your code, then you have to add them into public.xml, because you need to reference them somehow. Or you could use Resources.getIdentifier() method, but this is ugly.
And now the most tricky part: if you want to remove some resources, you have to remove info about them from public.xml as well. So first you have to be sure that they aren't referenced in the code. But there is also this "hole" problem, so:
If these resources are at the end of ids stack, then there is no problem.
If resources are near the end of ids stack and you are sure, that all resources after them aren't referenced in the code as well, then you could just remove them all. Actually you have did virtually the same, cause after modifying ids you made these lines totally useless, you broke them, so you could just remove them.
If you want to remove some resources, but add same or greater quantity of new ones (of the same type), then there is no problem - new resources will automatically fill in "holes" in ids. You don't have to add them to public.xml .
If none of above conditions are met, then you have holes and you have to fill them by something. But you don't have to add "useless .pngs" - just add:
Code:
<item type="drawable" name="DUMMY1" />
<item type="drawable" name="DUMMY2" />
<item type="drawable" name="DUMMY3" />
...
Like above, you don't have to add these resources to the public.xml .
And because I'm a newbie I don't really get what that mean. So I just delete the files that I'm going to replace and I can re-compile the framework, but I got bootloop, LOL.
I confused about :
1."You could remove any line from public.xml (even making a "hole" in the ids) at any moment, but you must be sure, that resource isn't referenced in the code."
What are the "holes" and " referenced in the code" mean?
2. Because I want to add .png's picture to the drawable-mdpi folder, Do I need to add dummies to the public.xml ?
3. I'm using the tricky signing method ( open archive in the original framework, copy meta-inf & android manifest and replace those files to the modded framework). Is this cause me an error?
Help me mateee:crying:

anyone???

How does WeChat store animated emojis (stickers)?

Hi,
I hope this is the right section for app-specific questions (if not, please move the thread)...
My wife recently got into that sticker/emoji-collecting-thing on WeChat (god knows why) and she would like to use the WeChat stickers on other messengers like Whatsapp (or have access to the image files in general). There are millions of tutorials how to make your own animated stickers for WeChat, but unfortunately there is zero information how to get them out of WeChat... Apparently everything is stored in the folder "Phone\tencent\MicroMsg\--some-md5-like-number--\emoji". Therein are subfolders like "com.tencent.xin.emoticon.NAME", I guess for each sticker creator, and the image files themselves have cryptic filenames like "fd0476f63c51690b88dd17d9be63af1c" without any extension. The good news is that PNGs and JPGs are saved "natively" - such files can be easily recognized by any image viewer via the header. However, animated stickers (typically discernible by the much larger file size) are apparently stored in a kind of proprietary format. It's not GIF or any image format I know of (or rather tried it with), it's also not a common compressed container, and the hex editor doesn't reveal anything useful, just densely packed gibberish...
Is there any kind of documentation on how WeChat stores animated images and how they can be converted back into something useful like GIF?

I was wondering this as well. I did the same digging as the OP, with one thing to add. I took a look at one of the said files – this one is 13Kb and about 1kb from the beginning there is a 648-byte xml rdf metadata tag. It shows that whatever this thing is, it was made with Photoshop. I took out the id's and hashes:
Code:
<rdf:Description rdf:about="" xmlns:xmpMM="http ://ns.adobe.com/xap/1.0/mm/" xmlns:stRef="http ://ns.adobe.com/xap/1.0/sType/ResourceRef#" xmlns:xmp="http ://ns.adobe.com/xap/1.0/" xmpMM:eek:riginalDocumentID="xmp.did:…" xmpMM:DocumentID="xmp.did:…" xmpMM:InstanceID="xmp.iid:…" xmp:CreatorTool="Adobe Photoshop CC 2015 (Windows)"> <xmpMM:DerivedFrom stRef:instanceID="xmp.iid:…" stRef:documentID="adobe:docid:photoshop:…"/> </rdf:Description> </rdf:RDF> </x:xmpmeta> <?xpacket end="r"?>

Looking for the same answer

It's been forever since this question was posted, but I still kinda want to know. I don't think anyone's figured out how. XD;;

Nope, I gave up and urged my wife to find a new hobby

Drats, the stickers are so adorable tho... iiOTL

The files are stored in the WXAM format (an in-house proprietary format). The most I found was this post detailing an exploit for WXGF (that's the name of the format), which includes POC code in Python (see zip at end of post) that encrypts a file to WXGF. In it, you can see the code calculating the encryption key - which, I imagine the way to decrypt them would be to do the opposite (obviously)
Python:
imei = '358035085174146'
key = hashlib.md5(imei).hexdigest()[0:16]
cipher = AES.new(key, AES.MODE_ECB)
result[0:1024] = cipher.encrypt(buffer[0:1024])
As for converting the unencrypted file - whether Android or Windows, it's contained in a dll or so file.
On Windows, the decompilation code can be found at
Code:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Tencent\WeChat\WXAMDecoder.dll
, while on Android it can be found at
Code:
libwechatcommon.so
Particularly on Android, the Java class located in
Code:
com.tencent.mm.plugin.gif.MMWXGFJNI
contains the java -> native implementation, with functions such as
Code:
nativePic2Wxam()
As for documenting the internal native code -> It's too much past my ability / time at the moment. Maybe this can be for someone for another day~ That being said, decryption isn't impossible as you saw above, related to IMEI and AES keys.
The particular function you were looking for was - sadly, using it would be a bit hard. But I imagine that you could take the so file, wire it up to an Android app with the same declarations here, and pass in the Wxam file in a byte[] array to get the result back -> You wouldn't have to know the internal code for that either, and since the type is byte[], we don't need to even reverse engineer the code to see what it supplied. Clearly it is a byte[] array of the files contents.
Code:
public static native byte[] nativeWxamToGif(byte[] bArr);
In fact, now that I think about it, I'd like to try it myself now and see what happens lol.
Edit: Yup, it works. I just decoded a few files. Working on decryption now. Sorry, I can't share it since I don't wanna get in trouble. But there's the information above ^^ If you can make Android apps and know enough, it's not hard

BBRecon said:
The files are stored in the WXAM format (an in-house proprietary format). The most I found was this post detailing an exploit for WXGF (that's the name of the format), which includes POC code in Python (see zip at end of post) that encrypts a file to WXGF. In it, you can see the code calculating the encryption key - which, I imagine the way to decrypt them would be to do the opposite (obviously)
Python:
imei = '358035085174146'
key = hashlib.md5(imei).hexdigest()[0:16]
cipher = AES.new(key, AES.MODE_ECB)
result[0:1024] = cipher.encrypt(buffer[0:1024])
As for converting the unencrypted file - whether Android or Windows, it's contained in a dll or so file.
On Windows, the decompilation code can be found at
Code:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Tencent\WeChat\WXAMDecoder.dll
, while on Android it can be found at
Code:
libwechatcommon.so
Particularly on Android, the Java class located in
Code:
com.tencent.mm.plugin.gif.MMWXGFJNI
contains the java -> native implementation, with functions such as
Code:
nativePic2Wxam()
As for documenting the internal native code -> It's too much past my ability / time at the moment. Maybe this can be for someone for another day~ That being said, decryption isn't impossible as you saw above, related to IMEI and AES keys.
The particular function you were looking for was - sadly, using it would be a bit hard. But I imagine that you could take the so file, wire it up to an Android app with the same declarations here, and pass in the Wxam file in a byte[] array to get the result back -> You wouldn't have to know the internal code for that either, and since the type is byte[], we don't need to even reverse engineer the code to see what it supplied. Clearly it is a byte[] array of the files contents.
Code:
public static native byte[] nativeWxamToGif(byte[] bArr);
In fact, now that I think about it, I'd like to try it myself now and see what happens lol.
Edit: Yup, it works. I just decoded a few files. Working on decryption now. Sorry, I can't share it since I don't wanna get in trouble. But there's the information above ^^ If you can make Android apps and know enough, it's not hard
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'm using nativeWxamToGif(), but I keep getting a return value of null. Do you know if it is still supposed to work? I tried the libwechatcommon.so in wechat versions 7 and 8 and still no luck.
My decryption code is almost the same as the encryption code. The only difference is that I strip off the trailing 0-pad and then reuse the imei-generated (using my own imei) key to decrypt.
Were you able to use nativePic2Wxam? The signature is too complex so it's too hard for me to guess what parameters to pass in.
Code:
private static native int nativePic2Wxam(String paramString1, String paramString2, int paramInt1, int paramInt2, int paramInt3, int paramInt4, int paramInt5);
Since I don't know how to use nativePic2Wxam, I'm just blindly trusting you that I should be able to decrypt one of the wxgf into wxam and then use nativeWxamToGif() to convert it to a gif. But I'm not sure why my gifs are always null.
I think I do have the libwechatcommon.so lib working because I am able to use other simple functions such as the following:
Code:
public static native int nativeRewindBuffer(long paramLong);
public static native int nativeUninit(long paramLong);
Does nativeWxamToGif() return null if the input byte array is invalid wxam or something?

Language Resources File

Please bear with me. I'm new to Android. But I'm a seasoned java developer. I have inherited a project with zero documentation that I'm trying to figure out. All of the text strings are retrieved from PreferenceManager and SharedPreferences. I put some debug statements in the method that retrieves the strings, and it is indeed finding a long JSON string with labels and values. But I cannot find the source for that. There is one strings.xml file in the res folder. But the strings.xml file is almost empty, and does not contain the labels/strings the app uses. I've grep'd the entire project (I believe) and I can't find any file with all of the labels/strings defined. I've done a clean rebuild, and this string is being built from somewhere. But no clue where it's finding it.
Can someone please help me? Where is the source file for this?
Thanks.
Jerry