Stumbled on these two programs that allow you to poke around inside of .dll files. Found them really handy and thought I would share. First one will diagram. The second one will display code. Perfect for seeing how others structure things.
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/AutoDiagrammer.aspx
http://www.red-gate.com/products/reflector/
that Red Gate .NET Reflector is awesome! what a convenient tool, and free too! I watched the demo video on the site and had to download it immediately!
Great find thanks! – also it kinda sux that anyone can easily just grab your source that you spent countless hours working on… i knew that dotnet assemblys were supposed to be ‘easy’ to decompile but DAMN!
Hi dave,
i’ve been using reflector for a while but hadn’t seen AutoDiagrammer. I might see if i can dump the source into a UserControl, then you could run it in Max. thanks!
Great find thanks! – also it kinda sux that anyone can easily just grab your source that you spent countless hours working on… i knew that dotnet assemblys were supposed to be ‘easy’ to decompile but DAMN!
aint that the truth, joel! it’s a bittersweet thang!
ha this thing works on executables too so you can drag reflector.exe into reflector and see all the source if you’re interested!
man, you are out of control! i thought if you did that it would rip a massive hole in spacetime or something!
Yea I was really surprised at what these could do.
Sounds like time to learn a little bit about obfuscating.
I think my code is naturally obfuscated, Dave – even I can’t figure out what is going on.
You also can load a dotnet dll in M$ Visual C# and inspect it’s classes and methods, just open the dll. Don’t know if you can read the whole source code.
-Johan
you’re right Johan, you can look at an assembly or class in VS with the Object Browser, its more like showing you the methods and class properties than the ‘dll disembowelment’ that reflector does!