Personally, storing a database password in a plain text file such as that is poor practice unless you have an EXTREMELY good reason.

In any case, just about any information you wanted would be available after decompilation, as it will be plain source code but, as woody pointed, that is not entirely a good thing.

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No, I think you misunderstood, the password is not in a plain text file but will be in the code somewhere, I thought maybe in plaintext, but no :) Anyway, back to my reading and thanks for all your replies. Ron

Sometimes a password will be plain text in complied code, but often programmers will break that sort of thing up or encrypt it and place it in places you wouldn't easily be able to identify as the password.

As a little test, you can compile a VB6 app where you have declared a few constants and variables, both assigned easy to spot unique values (like "This is my Constant" and "Here is my Variable").
Compile your code, and then view the compiled exe in notepad. The literals will show up as strings.
For example, if you make a variable and assign it a value of "THIS IS A LITERAL" you will be able to find the string: T H I S I S A L I T E R A L in your file.

I have seen hundreds of posts over the years looking for C++ or VB6 decompilers, but there is only so much info you can get out of doing it, and it will not be readable code, or anything close - most of it will not be useful at all. But the literals are there just for the taking in notepad without any decompiling at all.

Woody Z
http://www.learntoprogramnow.com
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No, you were right, I looked at all the literals, no password or anything obvious, I did find a note stating that it had been developed in VC++ though which was cool... the rest not much use. As I said before, I got more information about what exactly was going on from looking at the .xml files.

Anyway, it was an interesting exercise, and I think it was beneficial in that I got to see the output from various decompilers... and apps people claim to be decompilers - lol.

Many thanks everyone, Ron

Yes - I haven't yet seen a VB6 decompiler that does much that have been useful to me. On the other hand, in the old days of VB3 there were tools that could take an app apart - but VB3 was an interpreted language and the "compiled" exe was a different thing all together.

Woody Z
http://www.learntoprogramnow.com
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