Hello,
My company recently purchased source code from a company we have been
doing business with for several years. In the past, they have done all
of the development for this product. Their business had dwindled to
the point where we were the last company to use their software so we
purchased the source and brought development in house.
We have now found that our source is out of date for one of the
components. The component was last updated in February of 2002;
version 1.2.2. Our source (for this component) is for January of 2002
version 1.1.2.
This company has not been able to yet locate the source. They had
several temporary contractors work on the code over the years, and
version control apparently was not properly enforced.
We have the binary, and perhaps fortunately, it is a debug build (built
in VC++ 6.0).
Over the years I've always believed that shipping product with debug
symbols embedded would allow a person enough information to actually
reverse engineer the binary and steal source, but when I have done
preliminary disassembly of this particular component, I see nothing
extraordinarily useful.
This particular component has only 4 source files, no libraries linked
in, and is relatively small.
Is there a tool that can utilize this debug info and rebuild this
source? Is there a different approach that anyone can think of? I
have played with a decent one (REC;
http://www.backerstreet.com/rec/rec.htm), but have not yet fully
explored its possibilities.
This may be our only alternative if the company can't produce the
source. The bugs between versions were small, but typically critical.
Any input is appreciated.
Thank you!