Friday, July 22, 2011

.NET Decompilers

I was a hardcore fan of .NET Reflector; but the moment Red-Gate acquired and commercialized .NET Reflector, I had to look for alternatives, but couldn't find anything similar at that time. Meanwhile Red-Gate trying to save their face recently announced in their forum, those using Reflector 6 wont be forced to upgrade to the latest version of the .NET Reflector, this means developers sticking with the freeware version wont have access to the bug fixes as well as to new features introduced with the future versions of .NET Reflector.

In the mean time, .NET open source community(SharpDevelop) had kick started a new project as an alternative to .NET Reflector under the title ILSpy. The best thing with ILSpy is that, first of all its open source and the source code is available for you to download and study or to contribute. The short coming I came to notice with ILSpy was that, unlike .NET Reflector it lacks those rich plugins which were available with .NET Reflector. I believe these short comings is going to be filled up by the community, in the upcoming versions of ILSpy. Here's a video demonstrating the features available in ILSpy.


(To watch this video in Youtube, right-click the video and select 'Watch on Youtube')

There's a good news for Re-sharper 6 users. Jet brains is shipping an integrated .NET decompiler, which provides similar kind of functionality by .NET Reflector Pro, also there's a good news for non-resharper users. Jet brains is giving out a standalone version of their decompiler as freeware, you can downloaded the freeware version of the decompiler from here.

I think the acquisition of .NET Reflector by Red-Gate in fact had opened the doors for  the open source community to come up with ILSpy, which I believe is going to evolve as a robust product at a faster pace than .NET Reflector, the prime reason being its open source. I request you to provide your valuable feedback and suggestions on ILSpy in their forum

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