Reverse engineering

[Christopher Sharp]

I am presently working on some Visual C/C++ codes that need upgrading and
increase in efficiency. Some previous people who worked on the codes made
significant number of improvements, and created various application programs
that are available. Unfortunately, they did not provide the source code
files that go with these applications, which they should have. However,
I do have the source files that go with the earliest versions of the applications,
and they can be compiled and run, after some bugs are removed.

My question is, is there a way of reverse engineering the executable (.exe)
code, which includes a .dll file? As I already have earlier versions of
the source files, which include redundant code that is not used in those
versions, but at least some of it is used in the later applications, it should
be easier than starting from scratch. Incidentally, the later versions were
compiled using the release option.

Many thanks,

Christopher Sharp

[Danny Kalev]

There's no way to retrieve a source file from compiled (and probably
optimized) executables. What you can do is review the current source
files you have and manually optimize them. Then, compare the performance
of the resultant executable with the optimized executables you have.

Danny Kalev

"The ANSI/ISO C++ Professional Programmer's Handbook"
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0789720221


Christopher Sharp wrote:
>
> I am presently working on some Visual C/C++ codes that need upgrading and
> increase in efficiency. Some previous people who worked on the codes made
> significant number of improvements, and created various application programs
> that are available. Unfortunately, they did not provide the source code
> files that go with these applications, which they should have. However,
> I do have the source files that go with the earliest versions of the applications,
> and they can be compiled and run, after some bugs are removed.
>
> My question is, is there a way of reverse engineering the executable (.exe)
> code, which includes a .dll file? As I already have earlier versions of
> the source files, which include redundant code that is not used in those
> versions, but at least some of it is used in the later applications, it should
> be easier than starting from scratch. Incidentally, the later versions were
> compiled using the release option.
>
> Many thanks,
>
> Christopher Sharp