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copied!<p>First of all, you do not see the original source code; you see reverse-engineered source code.</p> <p>If you are interested in programmatically modifying an assembly, have a look at these projects: * The <a href="http://ccimetadata.codeplex.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><strong>Common Compiler Infrastructure (CCI) Metadata</strong></a> and <a href="http://cciast.codeplex.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">CCI AST</a> projects on CodePlex. That's exactly what they are for.</p> <blockquote> <p>"<em>[CCI] allows applications to efficiently analyze or modify .NET assemblies, modules, and debugging (PDB) files."</em> — from the project's website</p> </blockquote> <p>IIRC, CCI Metadata works at a fairly low level of abstraction. If you want to modify or insert code with it, you'll have to deal with Intermediate Language (IL). CCI AST provides higher-level abstractions (abstract syntax trees).</p> <p>(Btw. I suppose CCI won't allow you to tamper with strongly-named (signed) assemblies, since that would defeat their purpose.)</p> <ul> <li><p><a href="http://www.mono-project.com/Cecil" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><strong>Mono.Cecil</strong></a>. It was developed for Mono, but works on .NET too:</p> <blockquote> <p><em>"In simple English, with Cecil, you can load existing managed assemblies, browse all the contained types, modify them on the fly and save back to the disk the modified assembly."</em> — from the project's website</p> </blockquote></li> </ul> <p>Btw., there's a question here on Stack Overflow that asks for <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6727715/cci-vs-mono-cecil-advantages-and-disadvantages">a comparison of the two</a>.</p> <h2><strong>Other related libraries / frameworks:</strong></h2> <ul> <li><p><a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/roslyn" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><strong>Roslyn</strong></a>. This project's focus is on the representation of source code as abstract syntax/parse trees, and allows you to do e.g. source code analysis and manipulation. It's also supposed to be able to compile source code for you. However, Roslyn is <em>not</em> specialized on assembly manipulation. (To summarise, you could think of Roslyn as a mix of System.CodeDom and System.Linq.Expressions, but much more powerful than either of these.)</p></li> <li><p><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/users/80572/kevin-montrose">Kevin Montrose</a> has written an IL-emitting library called <strong><a href="https://github.com/kevin-montrose/sigil" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Sigil</a></strong> which is "A fail-fast, validating helper for DynamicMethod and ILGenerator."</p></li> <li><p>You can use the <code>ildasm</code> (IL disassembler) and <code>ilasm</code> (IL assembler) to do something called "round-tripping" (read about it e.g. <a href="https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jmstall/2006/01/13/debugabbility-with-roundtripping-assemblies/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">on Mike Stall's blog</a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>Round-tripping is where you decompile an app (perhaps via ILDasm), potentially edit the IL, and then recompile it (perhaps via ILAsm). This is the backbone for rewriting an assembly [...].</p> </blockquote></li> <li><p>A last option is the <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/de-de/library/system.reflection.aspx" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><strong>System.Reflection</strong></a> and <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/de-de/library/system.reflection.emit" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><strong>System.Reflection.Emit</strong></a> functionality in the .NET Base Class Library (BCL). The former allows you to inspect assemblies. The latter provides functionality to generate & save new assemblies to disk. As with CCI, you'll have to deal with raw IL. Also, I don't think they allow you to modify an existing assembly easily.</p></li> </ul>

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