recover source from DLL?

[Mike]

Hard drive failure recently caused me to loose a little data that hadn't
been backed up yet. One of the things was a small custom web control I was
writing -- not very fancy, but it took me all day, and I don't have the
time to rewrite it. I didn't obfuscate the code -- is it possible to recover
some semblance of the source? The DLL is only 4K in size.
Thanks
Mike

 

[Kevin Spencer]

You can use the IldAsm.exe tool that comes with the .Net platform to view
the MSIL in the DLL or executable. that's not exactly your source code, but
with some work, you might be able to rebuild the source code from the MSIL.

--
HTH,

Kevin Spencer
Microsoft MVP
..Net Developer
What You Seek Is What You Get.

 

[Marina]

There are some decompilers available for free, you can google for them. One
is called Anakrino. You can at least get something that way.

 

[Matt Berther]

Hello Mike,

You could take a look at .NET Reflector [1], which provides the functionality
you're looking for. Granted, the source doesnt have the same variable names
inside the methods and some blocks (ie: foreach and using) will be completely
expanded, but the code will be there.

[1] http://www.aisto.com/roeder/dotnet/

 

[Scott Allen]

I second Matt's nomination.

There is a nifty plugin for Reflector named FileDisassembler that can
be used to dump the decompiler output to files of any Reflector
supported language (C#, VB.NET, Delphi).

http://www.denisbauer.com/NETTools/

 

[jpierce]

Matt,

You might be interested in our commercial Decompiler.NET product. We do
retain local variable names when you have the pdb files, and we include
better optimizations than other decompilers so we do find foreach,
using, lock statements, etc. We also include obfuscation features and
some automatic refactoring capabilities. You can download a free trial
version from our web site at http://www.junglecreatures.com/

Jonathan Pierce
President
Jungle Creatures, Inc.
http://www.junglecreatures.com/