is there a possibility to convert dll file into project

[lucindaa]

Hi Friends,
i have 6 projects in my project, unfortunatelly one of my project is deleted i could not get it back but i have the dll of that project so i want to know is there any way to retrive the project again from the dll

[vishal1082]

if the DLL was built in Debug mode in Visual Studio then maaaaaaaaaybe yes, there are some decompilers (i dont wanna link/name here), they decompile the exe/dll to codes, though there are 2 problems:

• They rename all the declared variables cause the built project dll/exe does not contain variable name information.
• They are not free. (maybe anyone of them i dont know any)

Though i *think* using decompilers is sort of illegel i dont know, you can find the decompilers for C#.Net here.

[ThatThatGuy]

you can use http://reflector.red-gate.com... to dissemble your DLL to your original project

[lucindaa]

Hi ThatThatGuy ,
ihave downloaded the reflector and added the dll but donot know how to decompile the dll

[Frinavale]

lucindaa, you wont be able to retrieve everything that was lost but you can retrieve parts of it.

I don't know if this will help but maybe check out the MSIL Disassembler (Ildasm.exe). You should have this already installed on your computer.

-Frinny

[Frinavale]

I just tried the MSIL Disassembler (Ildasm.exe) on one of my DLLs and it's interesting. It spits out text that is your code but isn't....you should be able to put things back together based on what it outputs. But, like I said, it's not exactly code that's outputted and the majority of the code (any code that isn't function calls) is missing.

Hopefully you had good documentation before the project was deleted so that you can make sense of everything. Apparently you can dump the disassembled information into a .il file (that I've discovered is just text that you can open with notepad or whatever text editor you like). When you dump to the file you can pick what is dumped...you can include meta data and stuff. When I opened my dump I was able to see all of the XML comments for every function...so if you've kept good documentation (like XML comments) it could be very beneficial to you in putting your project back together.

You're going to have to recreate the project and based on the classes and functions (etc) that the disassembler outputs try to re-implement everything that was lost.

I think the Ildasm.exe tool comes with Visual Studio 8 but it because I have the visual studio SDK installed I'm not sure. It's found in the Visual Studio 8\sdk\v2.0\bin folder.

-Frinny