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by patio4it (tumblr) on October 14th, 2009
Why does VisualStudio 2010 keep destroying my form? Randomly, while I'm working on my project, the form just dissapears and errors pop up
by drezell on October 12th, 2010
| 1 person likes this
How do you run a DOS command line in a Visual Basic program? e.g run virtual box command line
by CIvandal on September 21st, 2010
| 1 person likes this
How C Programming language is similar to English language ? Explain.
by manasi on October 2nd, 2010
| 1 person likes this
How can I convert image to text using visual basics
by AmeEmely on December 9th, 2011
| 1 person likes this
I'm trying to make an ASCII graphics Visual Basic console game and my character won't move into the space immediately left on object?
by Ailurophile on March 19th, 2011
| 1 person likes this
You're reading Can anyone recommend a good Visual Basic Decompiler? Preferably free.
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Comments
You're saying that even if someone releases a free app as a binary, which was built with VB, that it's still illegal to decompile it?
How about the case where a company wrote the code themselves and built an app using VB, but later lost the source code somehow. It would be illegal for them to decompile their own app?
I think you're wrong about this.
by yeroco on October 15th, 2009
I misunderstood the question. In general however most program's rules state: It's not allowed to decompile (or 'reverse engineer') this program. Indeed when you lose the source code the only option is to rewrite it.
by patio4it (tumblr) on October 18th, 2009
Unless its your own code :)
by yeroco on October 18th, 2009
then you don't need a decompiler :-))
by patio4it (tumblr) on October 20th, 2009
No, I think you miss my point... Let's say you develop an application using VB. Then you use it for 10 years, at which point you want to make a modification. Unfortunately you find that the source code for the application was lost some time ago when the development machine's hard drive crashed, and there were no back ups. Now all you have is the binary. You should be within your legal rights to reverse engineer that binary back into source code (though I'm sure that code will look horrible and nearly impossible to read!).
by yeroco on October 20th, 2009
From binary code you can at best get assembler. Indeed readable for few people.
by patio4it (tumblr) on October 22nd, 2009
It's possible to decompile to a higher level language, like C, but the generated code would be difficult to read.
by yeroco on October 22nd, 2009
Theoretically yes, but the question is for free. I doubt it. It's so hard to write a decompiler that to do it free you need resources only available to big (read rich) companies.
by patio4it (tumblr) on October 24th, 2009
Hmm.. would you call gcc a good C/C++ compiler? It's free and quite excellent. In practice, though, decompilers are much more rare, and it's been a long while since I've looked for one. It could be that there are no good, open source decompilers out there.
by yeroco on October 24th, 2009
probably not at all, I'm afraid. Sorrry.
by patio4it (tumblr) on October 25th, 2009
Here's an example free decompiler that translates x86 machine code to C. It will not work for the person asking the question if they are using VB.net, since it would produce .NET code (similar in principle to Java byte codes).
http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~cristina/dcc.htm
by yeroco on October 25th, 2009