Question

I am doing work for a client who has lost the source code for one of their VB.Net WinForms applications. The assembly they have is not obfuscated at all. I am trying to recover as much of the source as I can as C# source and have tried several tools for decompiling assemblies, including Reflector, ILSpy and JustDecompile (all the latest versions), but they all produce code with a huge number of errors in them. Because of the large number of errors in the generated code, I am going to ask about the specific errors (in different questions), hopefully to get more directed answers and in this way try shed some light on why all the tools are having difficulty decompiling this assembly.

This question pertains to the fact that the code generated by all these tools always have a large number of invalid member variables (fields) such as the following:

private short $STATIC$Report_Print$20211C1280B1$nHeight;
private ArrayList $STATIC$Report_Print$20211C1280B1$oColumnLefts;
private StaticLocalInitFlag $STATIC$Report_Print$20211C1280B1$oColumnLefts$Init;

Can someone explain why the generated code has these invalid member variables and how I can resolve these?

Answer 1

Those are identifiers generated by the VB.NET compiler to implement the Static keyword. For example:

Class Example
    Public Sub test()
        Static lookhere As Integer = 42
    End Sub
End Class

generates this IL:

.field private specialname int32 $STATIC$test$2001$lookhere
.field private specialname class [Microsoft.VisualBasic]Microsoft.VisualBasic.CompilerServices.StaticLocalInitFlag $STATIC$test$2001$lookhere$Init

By using reserved letters in the field name, the compiler can be sure there will never be an accidental collision with another field. There’s no direct equivalent to Static in the C# language. You can leave them as private fields in the class but you have to watch out for initialization. The purpose of the $Init flag and rather a lot of IL that ensures the variable is correctly initialized. You’ll need to rename them by hand.