Windows PE - Where and how are strings stored if not in resources?

Posted by sdadsas on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by sdadsas
Published on 2010-03-16T15:00:27Z Indexed on 2010/03/23 2:31 UTC
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Windows

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pe

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disassembling

Usually strings (like content/titles of dialog boxes) in .exe files are stored in some sort of resources.

But in some recent exes I disassembled/resource-inspected I couldn't find any resources containing the string but it was somehow hardcoded with db's into the program source code.

How can I extract and modify strings directly located in the program? I assume those are just the equivalent to const char*s in C++?
Why would someone not "outsource" the contents of dialog boxes, menus, etc?

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