Open Source Alternatives to Reflector

Question

Just to ask if anyone knows of an open source alternative to RedGate s Reflector   I m interested in checking out how a tool similar to Reflector actually works     Note  if you know of a free but not open source alternative to Reflector  you can answer the following related question    Something Better than  NET Reflector    Summary - Updated 11th May 2011  A quick round-up of the various open source projects and tools that have been suggested    Common Compiler Infrastructure  CCI  Mono Cecil ILSpy dnSpy  fork of ILSpy  project appears more active than original  Dotnet IL Editor  DILE   IL View Monoflector  no longer active as of April 2011    The following resources may also be of interest    TypeView cs Jason Haley s notes on disassembling  NET Adrian Bank s recent blog post summarising a number of Reflector alternatives  including several options not mentioned below  Mark Lichtenberg s detailed blog post comparing several of the open source alternatives  DILE  ILSpy and Mono Cecil using MonoDevelop  to Reflector

User · Answer

Updated 13th December 2011  The following open source tools are available    ILSpy from the SharpDevelop team  Thanks to Scott Hanselman s tweet highlighting the tool  Dotnet IL Editor  a disassembler  IL View - a  NET Reflector alternative written in Silverlight 4 as an Out-of-Browser Silverlight Application   See this blog post for details

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Actually  I m pretty sure Reflector is considered a disassembler with some decompiler functionality   Disassembler because it reads the bytes out of an assembly s file and converts it to an assembly language  ILasm in this case    The Decompiler functionality it provides by parsing the IL into well known patterns  like expressions and statements  which then get translated into higher level languages like C   VB Net  etc   The addin api for Reflector allows you to write your own language translator if you wish     however the magic of how it parses the IL into the expression trees is a closely guarded secret   I would recommend looking at any of the three things mentioned above if you want to understand how IL disassemblers work  Dile  CCI and Mono are all good sources for this stuff   I also highly recommend getting the Ecma 335 spec and Serge Lidin s book too

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Telerik today released a Beta of their own decompilation tool  JustDecompile  Closed source  but free and looks promising

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2 options I know of    CCI Mono Cecil   These wont give you C  though

User · Answer

ILSpy works great     As far as I can tell it does everything that Reflector did and looks the same too

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I am currently working on an open-source disassembler   decompiler called Assembly Analyzer   It generates source code for methods  displays assembly metadata and resources  and allows you to walk through dependencies   The project is hosted on CodePlex    http   asmanalyzer codeplex com

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The Reflector tool uses Reflection  nbsp  - apparently this is not correct   You asked for two things - code that shows what reflector does  and also an alternative to reflector     Here s an example  much simplified from what Reflector does  but it shows the technique of reflection   TypeView cs  I don t have a suggestion for an open-source Reflector replacement

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The main reason I used Reflector  and  I think  the main reason most people used it  was for its decompiler  it can translate a method s IL back into source code   On that count  Monoflector would be the project to watch  It uses Cecil  which does the reflection  and Cecil Decompiler  which does the decompilation  But Monoflector layers a UI on top of both libraries  which should give you a very good idea of how to use the API   Monoflector is also a decent alternative to Reflector outright  It lets you browse the types and decompile the methods  which is 99  of what people used Reflector for  It s very rough around the edges  but I m thinking that will change quickly

User · Answer

Well  Reflector itself is a  NET assembly so you can open Reflector exe in Reflector to check out how it s built

User · Answer

Another replacement would be dotPeek  JetBrains announced it as a free tool  It will probably have more features when used with their Resharper but even when used alone it works very well   User experience is more like MSVS than a standalone disassembler  I like code reading more than in Reflector  Ctrl T navigation suits me better too  Just synchronizing the tree with the code pane could be better   All in all  it is still in development but very well usable already

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