I recently had a problem was a new color sensor I was working on: the datasheet was pretty spartan, and there was no information on converting the raw sensor values to something more useful like 'lux' or 'color temperature'.

What I did have was a Windows app for the official evaluation kit that gave me some of the values I was looking for.

I didn't have the eval kit, but it meant that the magic numbers had at least been worked out by someone in the company ... they just didn't make it outside the corporate firewall yet (officially).

Enter the wonderful world of .Net.

If you have a recent Windows based app from a a silicon vendor, there's about 9 chances in 10 it was written in either VB.Net or C#.Net. Thankfully, it's trivial to decompile .Net applications, and you might be able to find the magic numbers or formulas you need in the source code for the application.

Read on to see how easy it is to get from binary to C#, and fill in those blanks in your datasheet ...