Can you decompile a VB .exe?

After asking the question myself, the answer is... kind of.

If you have a VB application in versions 3.0 and lower, there is a decompiler. The guy who wrote the application is German. His website (written in German) is listed below. To translate it I used altavista's translators. (Don't ask me how good it is, since I do not have any VB 3.0 apps to try it on. It wouldn't recognize my VB 5.0 as a VB file.)

If you are using a more recent version of VB and are looking for something that gives you back your code or forms, etc... then no. But you can use a "Hex Editor" to pull some code out of a copy of the .exe. One that was suggested in Thread222-96333. There are plenty of free hex-editors, I found two. Just doing a search on google I found at the site listed below.

To use a hex-editor, I would recommend becoming familiar with ASCII codes, a few good sites are listed below since there is tons of junk in the text file you get.

Don't believe me? Want to make sure? Dodi, the German who made the decompiler, has been on the comp.lang.basic.visual.misc forum found at www.google.groups.com (Search on VB Decompilers, his screen name "VBDis", or his name "Dodi")

Helpful Links:
Dodi's Decompiler
http://www.fys.ruu.nl/~beljaars/Download.html

Dodi's Website
http://members.aol.com/vbdis/

Hex Editors:
http://dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Freeware/Editors/Hex_Editors/

Ascii Codes:
http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/product/software/ios11/rbook/rascii.htm
http://www.lanpoint.com/faqs/designpoint/asciichart.asp