If there is one, I often like to look at the database. The stuff that is stored and the names of the tables should give you a good idea how the application work

If there is one, I often like to look at the database. The stuff that is stored and the names of the tables should give you a good idea how the application works. Sort of unrelated, but I've got a story about a project I was looking through that confused the hell out of me. It was a C# library that would allow you to render an element from a shockwave flash file (it was either .swf or .fla). I spent ages digging through the code. The example worked really well, but I couldn't get it to work with one of my files. Eventually I contacted the author and he told me the library used reflection to get the name of your variable and would look for that variable name in the flash document.