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I was speaking about the suppliers : they almost have a monopoly and can do as they want with their customers.

This is so bad that one of them shipped us a software upgrade with a hard-coded ip address. Next time the ip change they will have to recompile ...

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/barf

That reminded me of a company I worked at. We were moving to a new datacenter, and the job of auditing and moving all of the scheduled tasks fell to me. A good 75% of the scheduled tasks were .exes for which we did not have the source code; and they all had connection strings hardcoded.

Thankfully, they were built in .NET, so I was able to decompile them, move the hardcoded stuff to .config files, and get it moved. But boy did that make me mad at the institutionalized laziness and sloppiness.

What did you use to decompile them into a project that was actually good enough to read through, change the needed things and compile it again?

I just used Reflector, which, at the time was free. There were a few issues that I had to tweak since reflector didn't do well with things like switch statements ... but for the most part it wasn't too bad. I was able to discern most of the munged variable names just by looking at the code and being familiar with the domain of the company.

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