Difference between project.dll and project.website.dll

Question

Greetings dear experts,

Last week, I was asked to find a way to reverse engineer a .net project written by someone who is no longer with the company that does not have the source code, only .aspx files.

This project was built a long time ago, long before I joined the company and was in framework 4.0

I downloaded Reflector decompiler.

Here is the challenge that I am dealing with.

Inside the bin directory of the project, there are several DLLs, project name called deliver.dll, another dll called deliver.website.dll.

The DataModel.dll, Telerik.Web.UI.dll, Telerik.Web.Desing.dll and Telerik.UI.Skins.dll

Initially, I decompiled only driver.website.dll and copied the rest of the DLLs into the bin directory of the new project of the same name deliver that I just created.

I was having so many errors, too numerous to post here.

I have two questions, what is the difference between the project deliver.dll and deliver.website.dll?

Do I have to decompile each individual DLL like project.dll, DataModel.dll and Telerik.dll variants, then compile them again and put their DLLs into the deliver.website project?

Your ingenious advise is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

a typical 4.0 website will be a solution, which one or more projects. each project produces a dll named after the project. so in your case deliver.dll and deliver.website.dll probably resent two different user projects. DataModel is probably a user project.

a 4.0 website generates several dlls depending on the style. if source incudes, then the page.aspx and its code behind are shipped with the site. if code behind style the page.aspx is shipped, but the code behind and the designer files are built into one dll. the designer files are partial classes,

also a project may reference 3rd party dll's and system.dll's.

the Telerik.* dlls are third party. they were probably added to the project a nuget packages. but you can start out as just binary references in the project.

the system dlls will need to be added as project references. the Microsoft one typically start with Microsoft. or system.

hint: your first goal is to determine which dll is the websites dll. this dll will have all the code behind and app code. when you decompile instead of seperate page files and designer files you will get one source file. you should create a small test site in the style of the your site. build and decompile to see how stuff is put together.

it will be quite a bit of work to get the site to work with visual studio if code behind and designer files were used.

Answer 2

In addition to my replies in the other thread, Telerik DLL are licensed and must have a login to https:/nuget.telerik.com/v3/index.json. Then once in there are tons of packages to wade through so be prepared with a user name and password the first time.

See the docs

Screen shot (I have it unchecked until needed)