editing DLL's

[goKi]

What program(s) can edit DLL files, i heard it was visualbasic, am i right?

10000th topic in GD :)

[The Savior]

Umm, I don't think you can edit DLLs with visual basic, unless they were created with VB. Perhaps a hex editor?

[Skatche]

You can create DLLs in C/C++ or VB, perhaps other languages as well. But to edit existing ones you need a hex editor, I think.

[Paradox]

to edit dll files all you need is notepad (you also need to know what you're doing)

[Goat]

You can edit anything in notepad, that's why it is seriosuly the best and most useful program on windows.

[Beldaran]

I thought that you needed source code to actually change the instructions and information contained in .dll files. Interesting. For instance, when I was working with the half life code, I would just make my changes, and then recompile the source into a dll file that had the same name as the original.

Anyways, how could you possible know what to change if you opened a dll in hex? Is there a method to translating the hundreds of thousands of memory locations and instructions contained in a hex file into information that a person can understand? That sounds interesting.

[Skatche]

it can be done, technically; if the code can be read by a computer, it can be read by a human, albeit with quite some difficulty. You could get the "source code" for ZC by disassembling it or even hex editing it (with a reference guide to the x86 instruction set), but it would be optimized to obscurity by the compiler, the disassembler wouldn't be able to tell what's an instruction and what's data, thus giving you a whole bunch of meaningless instructions before the actual program code, and the variables and/or functions would have no meaningful names - just memory addresses.

It would be like a programmer's nightmare.

[inori]

Generally, DLLs are compiled code - basically parts of programs. Saying you want to edit foo.dll is like saying you want to edit foo.exe - you generally don't do it; instead, you recompile the original source code, essentially recreating the file from scratch. (And never in Notepad. Try opening some random .exe file in Notepad and see what you can see, much less edit.)

That said, there are some DLL files that contain resources (icons, cursors, images, text strings, and the like). The resources in a DLL (or in an .exe file for that matter) can be edited. Generally, you'd use a programming tool such as Visual C++ to do so. I don't know whether Visual Basic can edit the resources in a DLL or not.

[MottZilla]

If you disasemble the DLL you can edit/modify/change it, and reasemble. However it requires aolt of time or alot of skill, depends on what you are doing maybe both.