Colin Wilson’s XN Resource Editor

A really useful tool that I have used for many years, was Colin Wilson’s XN Resource Editor.

XNResourceEditor

Before he apparently disappeared from the face of the earth, Colin was so kind to release the source code under the MPL on his homepage. Unfortunately this page now is also gone, only a few snapshots in the Internet Archive remain. Even more unfortunately the source code archive is not complete. It’s missing quite a few components and utility units.

I have started to try and recompile XN Resource Editor several times, usually because I stumbled upon yet another copy of its source code somewhere on the Internet, in the vain hope that this time it might be complete. The latest was in Stefan Sundin’s github repository. Unfortunately it turned out that – even though he claims that the repository contains all prerequisites – several files were missing, in particular the VirtualTreeView extension written by Colin.

This time I went back to the Internet Archive and tried to find a snapshot that contains the files necessary. It turned out that they were all there, just not in the same snapshot.

To cut a long story short: I managed to dig the complete source code of XN Resource Editor out of the Internet Archive of his homepage. While I am not 100% sure that it is the latest version, it at least compiles and seems to work. I put everything into the svn repository of the new XN Resource Editor project on SourceForge. It contains everything necessary, including the TNTComponents Suite and Virtual Treeview.

There is a !Readme.txt file describing the steps necessary to compile the program (You also need Delphi 2006 for that). Or, if you just need the executable and can’t find it anywhere else, look here.