Something better than NET Reflector

Question

I used to love  NET Reflector back in the day  but ever since Red Gate Software took over it has gone downhill dramatically  Now it forces me to update  which is absolutely ridiculous   half the time the update doesn t go smoothly  and it is increasingly hindering my productivity with each update  I am sick of it  and I am ready for something better  Is there a better disassembler   Update  List of various alternatives mentioned in answers -  ILSpy dotPeek JustDecompile DisSharper Mono Cecil Kaliro Dotnet IL Editor  DILE  Common Compiler Infrastructure

User · Answer

Some others not mentioned here -

Mono Cecil: 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.
Kaliro: This is a tool for exploring the content of applications built using the Microsoft.Net framework.
Dotnet IL Editor (DILE): Dotnet IL Editor (DILE) allows disassembling and debugging .NET 1.0/1.1/2.0/3.0/3.5 applications without source code or .pdb files. It can debug even itself or the assemblies of the .NET Framework on IL level.
Common Compiler Infrastructure: Microsoft Research Common Compiler Infrastructure (CCI) is a set of libraries and an application programming interface (API) that supports some of the functionality that is common to compilers and related programming tools. CCI is used primarily by applications that create, modify or analyze .NET portable executable (PE) and debug (PDB) files.

User · Answer

JetBrains is going to add a decompiler to its ReSharper  and release a stand-alone decompiler too      The good news is that we   re preparing a standalone binary-as-a-source application  i e  a decompiler   assembly browser to explore whatever  NET compiled code is legal to explore  We don   t have any specific date for release  but it   s going to be released this year  and it   s going to be free of charge  And by saying    free     we actually mean    free       Here is more information   UPDATE  JetBrains has now released the product called dotPeek and it can be found here

User · Answer

In my opinion  there are three serious alternatives to keep an eye on  all of which are free    ILSpy  This is from the same people who make the  also free  SharpDevelop IDE  As well as being free  it is also open source  An additional extension they are working on is the ability to debug decompiled code  something which the pro version of Reflector can do   which works surprisingly well  JustDecompile  A standalone decompiler from Telerik  announced today  currently in Beta   dotPeek  A standalone decompiler from JetBrains  available standalone as part of an EAP at the moment     All of these approach the problem in slightly different ways with differing UIs  I would suggest giving them all a try and seeing which one you prefer

User · Answer

The latest version from Red Gate is 6 1  However the 5 1 version cannot automatically update to version 6 because there were changes to the Terms of Service  so instead you are redirected to the site to download the 6 1 version  This is mostly because of legal reasons as you can check in the following post   Oi  What s going on with the  NET Reflector update mechanism   After you manually update to 6 1 you will no longer experience any problems

User · Answer

I am not sure what you really want here  If you want to see the  NET framework source code  you may try Netmassdownloader  It s free   If you want to see any assembly s code  not just  NET   you can use ReSharper  Although it s not free

User · Answer

Also take a look at ILSpy by SharpDevelop  It s in early stages of development and they just made a release on the 24th of February  That in itself works pretty good for me  From their website      ILSpy is the open-source  NET assembly   browser and decompiler       Development started after Red Gate   announced that the free version of    NET Reflector would cease to exist by   end of February 2011    Update  JetBrains has released dotPeek  its free  NET decompiler   Update 2  Telerik also has a free decompiler  JustDecompile

User · Answer

The  NET source code is available now   See this link or this  Or if you look for a decompiler  I was using DisSharper  It was good enough for me

User · Answer

9Rays used to have a decompiler  but I haven t checked in a while  It was not free  I remember     There is also a new one  at least for me  named Dis

User · Answer

Instead of using the autoupdater  we just set the properties of the EXE file to read-only  That way it doesn   t delete the file

[.net] Something better than .NET Reflector?

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