I used to love Reflector back in the day, but ever since Red Gate 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. Does anybody know of a better disassembler? Update: List of various alternatives mentioned in answers.
There are many reasons to why you might want to decompile an application after it's been compiled. Compiling C code just translates it into MS IL. The compiler of course does some magic and tweaks the code as much as possible. There's no metadata stored after compilation which means that comments and such will not be available in the IL output. The following image illustrates what happens when we compile something, we put the C code into a basket and tell the compiler to give us a binary of this which is sort of a black box at the moment. We know that whenever we want to use this black box we have something behind the curtain that knows how to open it and use it properly (read: CLR). Let's consider a basic variable instantiation and an equality check, when this is compiled it will output something partially readable. To me the output is readable but that's just because I have a weird love for IL. When this basic snippet was compiled using LINQPad it generated some IL which you can see below. Imagine that you got a DLL from an old co-worker and the code is long gone but you need to make some changes to the code. What do you do? One option is to mimic the functionality if the application is not too big and create it from scratch but that is just cumbersome. Instead what we want to do is something like you can see illustrated below; we want to go back from IL to C! So how do we do this? By using a decompiler! As I tend to do this quite often to understand how libraries work that I have no control over, I have tried some different tools for just this cause. Let's take a look at four of the most common ones on the market. Don't worry, there's both free versions and paid ones out there! Telerik Just Decompile The first one that we're looking at is a product from the Just* family created by Telerik. I do like the products from Telerik so this one should be quite.
Posted by Peter Wibeck on Monday, February 4, 2013 · 3 Comments After Reflector did change their licensing so it was no longer free to use I did stick around for a long time on an old version of Reflector. The time have now come to find an replacement for Reflector. After some searching I found 4 good candidates. Just Decompile Feature • Fast code navigation • Create visual studio projects • Extract resources from assemblies • Easy assembly management • Visual studio inline decompilation • Command line support • Integrate with Windows Explorer Context Menu • Silverlight XAP decompilation from URLdot Peek Feature • Decompiling. NET assemblies to C • Support for.dll.exe.zip.vsix.nupkg, and.winmd files • Quick jump to a 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. NET Code Reflect Features • Assembly class browsing • Decompile. NET code • MSIL disassembly view • Decompile C code • Decompile VB. NET code • Extract embedded resources • Hyperlink based navigation • Assembly dependency list •. NET framework 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, 3.5 ) Decompiling ILSpy with itself and recompiling the result should result in a working ILSpy copy Assembly editing capabilities (similar to Reflexil) Blog Posts on ILSpy Development Screencasts, Demo & How To Videos Overview of features in ILSpy Build 296 Resolution: 720p Screenshots Viewing IL ( Build 199) Navigating Types ( Build 199) Saving Resources ( Build 199) Decompiling a Type to C ( Build 199) Decompiling method with 'yield return' ( Build 528).
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