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Asked: 2026-05-29T22:38:17+00:00

I work for a small OEM manufacturer and have been tasked with making some

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I work for a small OEM manufacturer and have been tasked with making some minor changes to an application that we use on some of our customers’ equipment.
The application’s author has granted us permission to make those changes ourselves if we can.

(We also have the option of getting him to do it, but he wants to charge us an obscene amount to do it, so we’re going to give it our best shot on our own.)

I have little knowledge in programming and have started to get my hands dirty:
So far, I have decompiled the application with .Net reflector, and I have started to look at the code in Visual Studio (There are a few errors that pop-up when I click on debug), they don’t really appear to be too serious though.

I am to find references to a few words (company name, URL) and logos (company image) that I need to substitute for our own. So that when our customer loads the application, they see our company name and logo instead of the default one.

I’m stumped at this point, I need a method to proceed and a good starting point.

Any good advice will be greatly appreciated. Am I trying to do something impossible? Do I need to read a lot of books about C# before continuing?

Thank you!!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Get the source code. It’s not sane to run anything more than a trivial application from decompiled code. This is especially true if:

    I have little knowledge in programming and have started to get my
    hands dirty

    If you can’t get the source code, just leave the application as is. If the changes are purely aesthetic, they don’t sound like important changes (unless there is something you’re not telling us).

    Why is it important to have the actual source code?

    • Maintenance. Assuming that the vendor will one day release new features, bug fixes, etc, it’s possible to integrate these changes if you have the original / new code. Doing this from decompiled code increases the complexity significantly.
    • Comments. Even if there aren’t many comments in the original code, they are invaluable in terms of understanding what the original developer was thinking.
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