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Exe decomplier/ disamble??

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7 replies

by vuiyeechin

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I had one .exe file which is make by my company previous IT guy. Is there anyway to "open" it and see what is written inside? i had try PE Explorer and doesnt really understand the result..

Any one can help.. thanks.

7 replies

by spitfire_sysop

Unfortunately you will have to pay him for the software he made. He might even sell you the source if you ask nicely.

I'm afraid that even if you had the ability to decompile an executable that you would not understand the output.

Plus, if you disassemble an executeable you don't get the exact source code. So if you were to immediately take the output from the disassembler and try to recompile it you would get a completely different program and one that may not work the same.

If you are serious then you will need to know a few things to even be able to ask this question and get a rational answer:

1. What kind of exe is it?
(DOS? Win16? Win32? Win64?)
2. What language was it made from?
(C? C++? C#? .NET? VB?)

All of these circumstances would require different tools to debug, disassemble and decompile.

by robo_dev

If the prior IT guy wrote it, you would expect to find at least some trace of it on his former PC, no? Seriously, there are probably a dozen copies of the source code backed up on the server somewhere.

It would be easier to do a forensic recovery of a PC than to disassemble and reverse-engineer an application someone else wrote. At best, what you get from disassembly is some overall idea about how the app worked, what it's dependencies are, and some pseudo code, which is about five steps removed from source code you can modify and re-compile.

by vuiyeechin

i had explain it to my boss that this is his property.. is somehow " unethical " to "steal" other people source code.

I think it is a win32.. cuz is running on a windows server 2003 32 bit

should be vb? cuz i saw Vb is install in the desktop he previously use..

can i have some direction...

thanks...

by robo_dev

If there is a VB install on the desktop used by the former IT guy, then the source code is on that PC.

by spitfire_sysop

Tell him it will cost him more to pay a new programmer to work with the code and you might as well pay the first programmer. Time is money and he is wasting time. This is foolish and rude.

by tony hopkinson

Find the source, or start again. If it was .net / java and then it might be possible to reflect the code out and get something half way usable. For a straight win32 exe, not worth the bother, take too long, is too iffy for anything but the smallest of changes, and even then you'd have to be very careful.

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