EMERGENCY QUESTION - Can I Recover VB.NET SOURCE code from an EXE?

  • Thread starter Thread starter James Radke
  • Start date Start date
J

James Radke

Hello,

I have an emergency question - it was just determined that our backups were
incomplete, and we do not have the source code for an application we
developed (due to some system delete, and the bad backups)! We do, however
still have the EXE modules.. is there a way I can somehow recover the source
code from the exe?!?!

Thanks!

Jim
 
Don't get too overwhelmed... it doesn't actually "recover source code" it
produces "equivalent code." It's a subtle difference but you aren't going
to get your variable names back, you won't see your comments, etc.

Tokenizing compilers have been able to do this for decades.
 
James Radke said:
Hello,

I have an emergency question - it was just determined that our backups were
incomplete, and we do not have the source code for an application we
developed (due to some system delete, and the bad backups)! We do, however
still have the EXE modules.. is there a way I can somehow recover the source
code from the exe?!?!

Thanks!

Jim
Click to expand...
Look into .NET Reflector. It's a dissambler/decompiler that will output it
to either VB.NET or C#, and it's free. Do a google search on it.

Sueffel
 
There are some programs out there (Such as Reflector:
http://www.aisto.com/roeder/dotnet/) that can disassemble the IL in the EXE
and then you can choose to display the code as VB or C# (There is also a
download for Delphi.Net if you'd like)

It won't be 100% code generation, but the majority should come out in the
wash.
 
* "James Radke said:
I have an emergency question - it was just determined that our backups were
incomplete, and we do not have the source code for an application we
developed (due to some system delete, and the bad backups)! We do, however
still have the EXE modules.. is there a way I can somehow recover the source
code from the exe?!?!
Click to expand...

<http://www.aisto.com/roeder/dotnet/>
-> "Reflector for .NET"
 
And if you wrote the program in C#, you can decompile it back into a real
language ;)

--
HTH,
-- Tom Spink, Über Geek

Woe be the day VBC.EXE says, "OrElse what?"

Please respond to the newsgroup,
so all can benefit
 
To everybody who replied, thank you very much! You all saved me a lot of
time and effort!

Jim
 
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