Decompiling / reverse engineering mfc based exe file.

[CJack]

Dear all,
we have an application that was developed in VC 5 using MFC. we have
lost the source code. is it possible to decompile the exe and
generated VC code out of this exe file?
If yes then how, or from where we could download/buy such utility to
do the job for us.
If no then whats else could be done to retrieve source code?
thanking in advance for serious & helping answers

[Daniel Cohen Gindi]

Your only way is disassembling the file. It will take you a lot of time...

"CJack" <shaz...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:2e52a6a3.02063...@posting.google.com...

[Alec Soroudi]

Actually, if you've got the Debug version of the executable it shouldn't
be that bad, you can get a lot of info from it. However, if you've only got
the release version... :(

--
Alec
asor...@gaul.csd.uwo.ca

"Daniel Cohen Gindi" <dcg...@gmx.net> wrote in message
news:uHDflAEICHA.1600@tkmsftngp13...

[Russ Freeman]

"CJack" <shaz...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:2e52a6a3.02063...@posting.google.com...

LOL. Restore from backup?

You may as well begin work on rewriting it coz in the long run any effort
you put into reverse engineering it will be wasted. Get over your loss,
learn from your mistakes and get the IDE out.

--
russ.
http://www.gipsysoft.com/ - Code, tips and cool stuff!
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[Joseph M. Newcomer]

No.

You can't recreate source code, you can't recreate classes, you can barely, with only
massive effort, recreate simple structs, and there is little if any hope of reconstructing
even simple C code from optimized machine code. I had a friend who got his PhD back around
1974 or so for decompiling optimized code into what we would now recognize as a trivial
subset of C code (no structs, for example); the problem is fundamentally HARD. I'd have
trouble doing it, and I'm a fairly serious compiler expert. I wouldn't touch a probject
like this.

I'd consider a moderate-sized subroutine to be challenging. I'd consider any serious
application impossible. You could probably rewrite it faster than you could
reverse-engineer it, and get a far better result.

Bottom line: you're probably out of luck. In several ways. Even a disassembler isn't going
to help you very much.

joe

Joseph M. Newcomer [MVP]
email: newc...@flounder.com
Web: http://www3.pgh.net/~newcomer
MVP Tips: http://www3.pgh.net/~newcomer/mvp_tips.htm