Can i reverse engineer my own dll?

Question

Hi folks,

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 :)

Answer 1

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

http://www.codeplex.com/reflectoraddins

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.

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.