Have an exe program made by visual studio, can I know which language its made from?

Question

0.00/5 (No votes)

See more:

I'm 100% sure that it's a visual studio program because of the default form's background color, but the question is how can I know which program it's made of.

I think there's a way to figure it out, because back to school I remember my friend decomposing a program and he said it's made in visual basic, and he showed me it's source code!

there must be a way to figure it out, can or can't it be done ?

Posted 30-Jun-11 8:59am

adam4l

Add a Solution

3 solutions

Add a Solution

Add your solution here

Treat my content as plain text, not as HTML

Preview 0

…

Existing Members

Sign in to your account

...or Join us

Download, Vote, Comment, Publish.

Your Email
Password
Forgot your password?

Your Email
This email is in use. Do you need your password?
Optional Password

I have read and agree to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy
Please subscribe me to the CodeProject newsletters

When answering a question please:

Read the question carefully.
Understand that English isn't everyone's first language so be lenient of bad spelling and grammar.
If a question is poorly phrased then either ask for clarification, ignore it, or edit the question and fix the problem. Insults are not welcome.
Don't tell someone to read the manual. Chances are they have and don't get it. Provide an answer or move on to the next question.

Let's work to help developers, not make them feel stupid.

This content, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL)

Valery Possoz · Answer 1 · 2011-06-30T10:30:00

Hello,

No it is not possible to be 100% sure...

C# and Vb.Net or any .Net compliant language once compiled in an assembly or an executable are in fact translated in CIL (Common Intermediary Language), this is the language that the .Net framework (or Mono) will use to execute the application.

You can use a tool such as Reflector to decompile a .Net assembly and present the code in C#, Vb.Net, and a variety of .net programming languages, but that won't tell you what language was use to write the software.

You can look at clues in the code, but it's not really 100% sure. For example if you find a reference to Microsoft.VisualBasic then maybe VB.net was the tool used, but there is no guaranty.

Conclusion is Reflector will show you some code but not the original code! don't rely on it.

Valery.

Sander Rossel · Answer 2 · 2011-06-30T10:32:00

Adding to what has already been said:
Downloading Reflector (which you now have to pay for) will not help all that much. Yes, it does show you the source code, but no it will not tell you in which language it was originally programmed.
And actually it does not really matter when dealing with .NET (at least VB and C#), since all .NET languages will compile into the same language. This also makes it possible for applications such as Reflector (or the free of charge JustDecompile) to decompile any .NET program into VB or C#. But it won't tell you if the original code was coded in C# or VB.
They are great tools nevertheless though :)

How to disassemble non-.NET libraries I do not know. But surely Google could provide all the help you need ;)

**theanil** · Answer 3 · 2011-06-30T09:03:00

Solution 1

yes there is a way to extract the code just download a application called reflector it will extract the code back from the exe or dll file...
An awesome application.

its easy to know in which language the code is written by looking at how the package or namespace is inserted

Posted 30-Jun-11 9:03am

theanil

Updated 30-Jun-11 9:58am

v2

Comments

fjdiewornncalwe 30-Jun-11 22:46pm

OPs answer to comment... Thanks but how I'm gonna know which language I'm dealing with?
for example, their are lots of similarities between C# and J# so I can't just guess by taking a look in the source code.
Does that reflector application tell you what language you're dealing with?

Have an exe program made by visual studio, can I know which language its made from?

3 solutions

Solution 3

Solution 4

Solution 1

Add your solution here

Preview 0