The toolset included in Visual Studio is just massive. I swear that I could use Visual Studio for a lifetime and I still would not have plumbed all its depths.
With that thought in mind, I just realized that I need not look for poor third party applications to look inside a binary file. I can use my trusty IDE Swiss Army knife, Visual Studio.
There are two ways to view and edit a binary file in Visual Studio:
- Simply open a file with the extension of .BIN
- After selecting the file in “Open –> FIle…” but before you click the “Open” button, instead click on the dropdown arrow on the “Open” button and select “Open With …”. Then select “Binary Editor” from the list.
Either way you are then presented with the standard type of Binary File editor (3 columns, 1- The Offset, 2- The binary data & 3- The ASCII representation of the binary data).
In this editor, you can copy, paste, add, alter and delete bytes!
If only I had known this years ago!
