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Written by ROMMIX on 2025-01-11 at 23:58

So iexpress.exe is a simple installer maker already installed with Windows.

In my 30 years of existence, that blew my mind.

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Descendants

Written by Matt Campbell on 2025-01-12 at 00:17

@rommix0 Wow, I didn't know about that. Based on the file metadata, it apparently came out of the IE division.

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Written by ROMMIX on 2025-01-12 at 00:18

@matt The Internet Explorer division i'm guessing. That's interesting.

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Written by Matt Campbell on 2025-01-12 at 00:18

@rommix0 Sorry, yes, that's what I meant.

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Written by Matt Campbell on 2025-01-12 at 00:26

@rommix0 Apparently they've kept the build definition for that executable maintained just enough to ship a native 64-bit build, but it's still using the old VC++ runtime that Windows has shipped for a long time, not the UCRT. And if it uses the standard C++ library at all, that must be statically linked, so I'm guessing it doesn't. MS code that's as old as I'm guessing this is didn't use many standard C++ library features.

Note: I was on the Windows team at MS from mid 2017 to late 2020.

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Written by ROMMIX on 2025-01-12 at 00:28

@matt That's a good thing. That means it can compile an installer that will run even on Win9x machines.

Gotta love programs that still rely on VC6 era runtimes.

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Written by Matt Campbell on 2025-01-12 at 00:28

@rommix0 Compare the DLL import table with, say, UIAutomationCore.dll, which does use the UCRT and a dynamically linked VC++ library. (I was on the Windows accessibility team, so I worked on UIAutomationCore.)

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Written by ROMMIX on 2025-01-12 at 00:29

@matt Oh okay. What does that particular library do exactly?

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Written by Matt Campbell on 2025-01-12 at 00:30

@rommix0 UI Automation is the modern Windows accessibility API. Narrator uses it exclusively, and other Windows screen readers use it along with other techniques.

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Written by ROMMIX on 2025-01-12 at 00:31

@matt I gotcha. I assume it interfaces with SAPI and all that as well.

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Written by Matt Campbell on 2025-01-12 at 00:33

@rommix0 UIA is completely independent of SAPI, since speech synthesis isn't the only thing that assistive technologies do. But Narrator supports both SAPI and the Windows OneCore speech API (basically a newer version of SAPI wrapped in a WinRT API).

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Written by ROMMIX on 2025-01-12 at 00:35

@matt Interesting. From what I've seen, I haven't seen too many third party developers use OneCore much except Microsoft.

SAPI seems to still be the most widely used despite it being legacy these days.

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Written by Matt Campbell on 2025-01-12 at 00:37

@rommix0 I don't recall if Microsoft ever released an official way for third parties to make their engines available through the OneCore speech API. So for all practical purposes, I think that API is limited to Microsoft voices. Still, NVDA supports it, because it supports faster and more responsive speech than the same voices via SAPI.

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Written by Matt Campbell on 2025-01-12 at 00:39

@rommix0 Anyway, I see iexpress is also nice and small. The .text section is only 64K. The .rsrc section (with dialogs, icons, etc.) is actually bigger.

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Written by ROMMIX on 2025-01-12 at 00:39

@matt That makes sense. I'm sure the icons are in bitmap format hence the size.

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Written by ROMMIX on 2025-01-12 at 00:39

@matt I figured that was the case. It's odd though because you would think Microsoft would give a company like Nuance access to it.

They are like the biggest text-to-speech related company in the world.

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