Some years ago Lutz Roeder, a clever your guy at Microsoft built a decompiler for .NET assemblies and made it freely available to the developer community. (Reflector)
A couple of years ago Red Gate Software acquired Reflector and earlier this year announced that it would no longer be free. Due to the massive backlash of that announcement they reversed their decision and old versions will continue to work without being paid for.
Please understand, I make no dispersions on Red Gate as a company, they make fine products and are entitled to do with their acquisitions whatever they please.
The folks at JetBrains, who also make great products has producted a great, FREE alternative to Reflector and the first preview release is now available and very promising.
In the screen shot below I’m walking the ASP.NET System.Web.Razor assembly from the GAC.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
And here you can see some of the exploration options available.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
From the JetBrains Web Site
What’s Cool about dotPeek?
- Decompiling .NET 1.0-4.0 assemblies to C#
- Quick jump to a specific type, assembly, symbol, or type member
- Effortless navigation to symbol declarations, implementations, derived and base symbols, and more
- Accurate search for symbol usages
with advanced presentation of search results - Overview of inheritance chains
- Support for downloading code from source servers
- Syntax highlighting
- Complete keyboard support
- dotPeek is free!
Though this is an early access version – I’m finding it perfectly usable. If this is the pre-beta, the future for dotPeek holds great promise.
Check it out [ HERE ]
