Lutz Roeder's .NET Reflector, most useful thing ever. Discuss.

Reflector is so useful in the kind of stuff I do with dotnet - I don't know how popular it is out in the community however...do you guys use it?

Another great tool from Lutz is the 'Regulator' which as it's name suggests is all about assisting with RegEx.

Lutz Roeder: another of my heroes.

Agreed whole heartedly. I don't know what I'd do without Reflector. Okay, I'd probably use ildasm, but Reflector is better.

But if I'm allowed one tiny nit: this post would be better suited to the Coffeehouse.

J2K wrote:


Reflector is so useful in the kind of stuff I do with dotnet - I don't know how popular it is out in the community however...do you guys use it?

Another great tool from Lutz is the 'Regulator' which as it's name suggests is all about assisting with RegEx.

Lutz Roeder: another of my heroes.

yep.  It has been around awhile.  Love it, use it.

It's the most awesome developer tool I know and use. I even use it as a replacement for other stuff. Like documentation: I can usually find something faster in Reflector than I can in the Visual Studio documentation. Or I use Reflector on my own compiled code to find relationships between classes and methods.

I was quite surprised when I started digging through the framework dlls.  They are in no way obfuscated.  So you can load them up in Reflector and start digging around in your favorite namespace and see exactly whats under the covers with its disassembler!

Whole heartily agree,

I needed to automate some of the functionality of mageui.exe onto a web server; reflector totally helped me out however I can’t help but feel less secure when writing .NET apps as I know every developer can just see all your security mechanisms. But i guess when an app is on a local box security is never really safe.
(windbg rules: you are never safe )

Yeah Reflector is a great tool.

love it.


and security is relative....

and I'd rather have code you *CAN* verify and check

get the trojans and other gunk out -- and be able to scan for back doors etc....


than some "Ball of code" that no human can trace and may hide any kind of malware / keyloger etc....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obfuscated_code

I hate it, because it allowed script kiddies to read my human readable code.

I might as well just give them the cs files and the compiler, and let them create zombie like applications that resemble mine and fool my customers or worse, use it to exploit my services.

I had , as many of you know, in the  past, been vocal on this issue, and wanted MS to enable us to deliver encrypted MSIL to customers and then CLR would decrypt and run on demand with the JITTER.

I am hopeful they will still implement this in the future. In the mean time I am going to implement my own cutom solution , which is to encrypt the MSIL, and use a C++ loader, that will decrypt the assemblies in memory and then run them.

Crude but what can one do?

SecretSoftware wrote:

I hate it, because it allowed script kiddies to read my human readable code.

I might as well just give them the cs files and the compiler, and let them create zombie like applications that resemble mine and fool my customers or worse, use it to exploit my services.

I had , as many of you know, in the  past, been vocal on this issue, and wanted MS to enable us to deliver encrypted MSIL to customers and then CLR would decrypt and run on demand with the JITTER.

I am hopeful they will still implement this in the future. In the mean time I am going to implement my own cutom solution , which is to encrypt the MSIL, and use a C++ loader, that will decrypt the assemblies in memory and then run them.

Crude but what can one do?

      The bunch of new features added into this little lovely tool are really awesome:P

      Now you can navigate the methods and classes which are annotated with comments, why we need MSDN documentation now:O

     Another great feature is showing the comments for the IL opcode in the tooltip, this feature is really a big time saver, because I ain't need to open documentation or IL spec to find the meaning and usage of a particular opcode.
     ++ for Lutz, you guy rocks;)


Sheva

I'd just read the Reflector post on Scott Hanselman's site about plugins. Who knew you could debug a straight-up assembly?

CodeMetrics : Analyses .NET assemblies and shows design quality metrics. Download	Review : Allows editing and managing annotations during code reviews. Download	Diff : This add-in shows differences between two versions of the same assembly. Download
FileDisassembler : This add-in can be used to dump the disassembler output to files for any Reflector supported language.	SQL2005Browser : This add-in allows to browse .NET assemblies stored in SQL Server 2005 databases.	FileGenerator : This add-in can be used to dump the disassembler output to files for any Reflector supported language.
Deblector : This add-in allows to debug processes from within Reflector.	Doubler : A code generator for unit tests, stubs and wrappers.	Graph : This add-in draws assembly dependency graphs and IL graphs. Please read the install instructions here .
DependencyStructureMatrix : Allows you to create and browser dependency structure matrices.	CodeSearch : This add-in allows searching for strings and regular expressions in disassembled code. Download	SequenceViz : This add-in draws sequence diagrams.
PowerShellLanguage : Renders output as Windows PowerShell script.	DelphiLanguage : The Delphi view that is used inside .NET Reflector provided as a language add-in.	CppCliLanguage : This add-in extends Reflector with a C++/CLI language rendering module.
Hawkeye : A tool that allows you to debug the UI tree of Windows Forms applications.	ClassView : Shows class definitions as plain text with color coding.	CodeModelViewer : This add-in shows the underlying code model objects for selected items.
Diff : This add-in shows differences between two versions of the same assembly. Download	ComLoader : Lists COM components for browsing and converts them into managed interop assemblies. Download	TestDriven.net : This Visual Studio add-in can navigate to any code element inside Reflector with a single click.
BizTalkDisassembler : Allows you to list all BizTalk artifacts contained in an assembly and extract them. Download	ComLoader : Lists COM components for browsing and converts them into managed interop assemblies. Download	AutoDiagrammer : This add-in draws class diagrams.

SecretSoftware wrote:

I hate it, because it allowed script kiddies to read my human readable code.

I might as well just give them the cs files and the compiler, and let them create zombie like applications that resemble mine and fool my customers or worse, use it to exploit my services.

I had , as many of you know, in the  past, been vocal on this issue, and wanted MS to enable us to deliver encrypted MSIL to customers and then CLR would decrypt and run on demand with the JITTER.

I am hopeful they will still implement this in the future. In the mean time I am going to implement my own cutom solution , which is to encrypt the MSIL, and use a C++ loader, that will decrypt the assemblies in memory and then run them.

Crude but what can one do?

See, now I feel like I've missed something.

I heard about reflector way back when I was allowed to write .NET code (sulking about having to write C++ cross-platform code at the moment.) but never used it. I usually prefer to read english descriptions of what something does than try to understand code.

But now I get the impression I may be wrong about that, ah well... I shall have a look and see.

DanWygant wrote:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obfuscated_code