Can i reverse engineer my own dll?

Question

We've got a .NET project at work, which we lost (human error). The person who wrote the code said she had three projects in the solution => one webform, one winform and one class library.

Now, we have the final DLLs and website. Is there anything we can do with this?

For the class library, I was thinking about using Reflector to copy/paste the code and, with time, rename MethodNames and variables, etc.. to some nice english stuff.

For the website, not sure.

Does anyone have any ideas or options?

She said she doesn't have the pdb files either :( (Release builds).

Cheers :)

Cutlor

Answer 1

Use the FileDissasembler extension here to simply extract the full code using Reflector:

http://www.codeplex.com/reflectoraddins

Forgiveness

I've done this before (lost the source of my own project). This is an easy way to get it back. – Jehovist

I've just tried it with one of our dll's. pretty kewl!! it looks like it's plenty enough for us to work with (thank gawd!). Does it work with .exe's AND websites? – Cutlor

It will work with any .NET assembly. Web site static content, such as html files, scripts, images, etc. should just be in a folder, and will not be part of the .dll. – Forgiveness

This didn't work for me. I was trying to get the code from the DLLs and EXEs associated with the ALPS touchpad driver. If you guys know of any other option, it would be much appreciated. I can give you more details if you want/need them, but a comment is probably the wrong place to give all the info. – Febricity

Answer 2

Yes, you can actually reverse engineer the entire code without copying and pasting at all. I've done this before, and it was this Reflector add-in that I used.

There will be some minor clean-up afterwards (integers come out as hex, etc.) but it works like a charm. It doesn't matter if you don't have the PDB's, as long as you didn't obfuscate the dll's you'll get readable code.

Maxma

Answer 3

Reflector has a plugin that allows you to export a project out of a Dll.

It is called FileDisassembler - http://www.denisbauer.com/NETTools/FileDisassembler.aspx

Anyway I think the work of getting your files back won't be a piece of cake. Maybe give a try to some data restore apps or these magical undelete applications.

Hap