covered elsewhere too. With this knowledge, you could write a very simple program that checked to see if a file was a .NET assembly by looking for a start of " took advantage of this fact.
Now, where can I put "
------------------------------------- "When I was 10 or so, I thought you could open up a .EXE in a text editor and do meaningful work with it if you only knew some magical secret." ------------------------------------- Huseyin: Good point on 0xCAFEBABE and PK. Similar things can be said for WAV, GIF, and other files. I think that Apache's Mimemagic module (and similar modules) looks for these to determine the real file type.
I was thinking exactly the same when I was first introduced to computers. I was opening any file (text or binary) with a text editor and fiddling around.
Btw the compiled .java files, .class files, start with these 4 bytes: 0xCA 0xFE 0xBA 0xBE aka Cafe Babe and ZIP files start with PK.