Recently I was working with a C# tool and found it didn’t quite do what I was expecting. Knowing that C# is fairly similar to Java in terms of compiling down to bytecode and running on a language VM I figured I might have a go at disassembling the C# executable and attempting to patch what I needed.

As a Java developer who occasionally has to deal with bugs in third party, closed-source, libraries I have become fairly adept at disassembling code to figure out what’s going on and potentially patch it to have the behaviour I need. Reverse engineering should never be the first option to try, and it is more often than not against the ToS and licenses of whatever third party code you’re meddling with (sometimes Oracle post crazy rants against third party investigations of their code) but sometimes it’s the only way to truly find out what is going on, especially when the documentation is short on details or outright incorrect.

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