CODEWITHSUNDEEP
.netreverse-engineeringreflector
Pure.Krome
Pure.Krome

Reputation: 87047

Can i reverse engineer my own dll?

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 :)

Upvotes: 7

Views: 14565

Answers (4)

LapplandsCohan
LapplandsCohan

Reputation: 775

The question, as well as previous answers, are as of this writing 15 years old. Not suprisingly the software landscape has changed, and all links in the older answers are either dead or going to a generic page not containing any relevant information. As this question still is a top result on search engines it might benefit from some updated information:

  • The .NET Reflector is now proprietary software owned and sold by Red Gate Software.

Some free projects based on forks made before Reflector went proprietary:

Things may have changed again by the time you read this.

Upvotes: 2

Shay Friedman
Shay Friedman

Reputation: 4868

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.

Upvotes: 3

womp
womp

Reputation: 116987

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.

Upvotes: 5

jrista
jrista

Reputation: 33010

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

http://www.codeplex.com/reflectoraddins

Upvotes: 15

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