Why do I see a lot of weird characters when I open certain files comprising native applications

Question

I tried to open a file (QBWebConnector [which has no file extension]) in notepad but only saw this:

MZ ÿÿ ¸ @ € º ´ Í!¸LÍ!This program cannot be run in DOS mode.

$ PE L A˜I à  P ¾m €  À  ¹H @      dm W € È € (    H .text ÄM P  .rsrc È €  @ @.reloc     p @ B

And about 50 other pages of garbage plus some human readable stuff that wasn't formatted correctly. Apparently that happened because this code is already compiled but how can I either open this so that I can see the code that the original developer wrote or the source code that I should be working with to modify this app (it's open source).

Answer 1

You opened a binary as a text document. Your word processor then tries to render the assembled code as binary, which Doesn't Really Work (that is to say, it SUCCEEDS, but it's nothing usable to the user).

In order to get to the source code, you'll have to track it down on the web wherever you got your QBWebConnector from. A quick google search turned up a couple resources for you:

http://wiki.consolibyte.com/wiki/doku.php/quickbooks_integration_vbdotnet in Visual Basic http://wiki.consolibyte.com/wiki/doku.php/quickbooks_integration_php in PHP http://wiki.consolibyte.com/wiki/doku.php/quickbooks_web_connector overview

Good luck!