How to reverse-engineer a WSP or Web Part
I recently joined my current employer and inherited all of the fun SharePoint duties. I quickly noticed that there was little-to-no documentation done by my predecessor and I have had to reverse-engineer how a lot of the various customizations work. I have recently come across a .wsp solution which is deployed to the farm. No one knows exactly what the solution is, except that it apparently involved deploying a web part. Is there a way to decode either the .wsp or the web part itself and view the code behind it to see what is going on?
August 11th, 2010 7:34pm

Change the extension from .WSP to .CAB. Extract the cab to a subdirectory and then you can browse the subdirectory to see the files in the solution. Take a look at the Manifest.xml file in the root folder to see what the solution deployed. Depending on what it deployed there will be other files included. They should give you an idea what the solution does. If necessary you can also try using Reflector from Red Gate on the managed code assembly to read the source code of the web part. You can find .NET reflector here: http://www.red-gate.com/products/reflector/Paul Stork SharePoint Server MVP
Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
August 11th, 2010 8:07pm

So you are saying that changing or re-engineering ANY web part is criminal? Even those that are offered for free and state that we can change them? Scott Graves Cheif Engineer Gayaworks
May 7th, 2012 11:43pm

That Depends on whether it is a commercial product and copyrighted or not. In general anything with a copyright would prohibit reverse engineering. But as I mentioned above it sounds like this is internal code developed by a previous employee who didn't leave the source code. In that case the company owns the code and can do what they like with it.Paul Stork SharePoint Server MVP Senior Solutions Architect: BlueChip Consulting Group Blog: http://dontpapanic.com/blog Twitter: Follow @pstork Please remember to mark your question as "answered" if this solves your problem.
Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
May 8th, 2012 8:26am

That Depends on whether it is a commercial product and copyrighted or not. In general anything with a copyright would prohibit reverse engineering. But as I mentioned above it sounds like this is internal code developed by a previous employee who didn't leave the source code. In that case the company owns the code and can do what they like with it.Paul Stork SharePoint Server MVP Senior Solutions Architect: BlueChip Consulting Group Blog: http://dontpapanic.com/blog Twitter: Follow @pstork Please remember to mark your question as "answered" if this solves your problem.
May 8th, 2012 8:26am

Hi Paul; Sorry. Never got around to replying because I was able to resolve the situation by abandoning the process that required the extraction. However a point of information is that the WSP file from which I was trying to extract the files was one I had created using Visual Studio. Yet I was never able to extract the files. Edward R. Joell MCSD MCDBA
Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
May 8th, 2012 9:01am

Hi Paul; Sorry. Never got around to replying because I was able to resolve the situation by abandoning the process that required the extraction. However a point of information is that the WSP file from which I was trying to extract the files was one I had created using Visual Studio. Yet I was never able to extract the files. Edward R. Joell MCSD MCDBA
May 8th, 2012 9:01am

This topic is archived. No further replies will be accepted.

Other recent topics Other recent topics