Making changes to a precompiled website

Question

As seems my life at present, I have inherited yet another project that needs changing.

However this code has been precompiled (and guess what...)

I have what puports to be some of the source code, and a set of assemblies form the temp folder. However the project is moaning about missing some user controls and a master page in a sub directory.

I cannot see these anywhere in the assembiles I have, and they are not in the code I took from the website. So, where do I find the UI part of precompiled masterpages and user controls ?

Answer 1

You can use an IL decompiler like ilspy or reflector on the compiled website DLL and retrieve the original source code from it.

This is likely to take quite a bit of time and effort, but you should be able to reconstruct most of the missing source this way (though you will probably not have the correct variable names or exactly the same code and definitely no comments).