Reflector: Disassemblement for the Masses

I appreciate it’s probably an unpopular pastime for many of us geeky developer types but sometimes talking to colleagues does have its benefits. Once we’d finished discussing the latest BattleStar Galactica episodes and reminiscing about tabletop war gaming our conversation turned to tools of a cool nature, particularly reflector.

Reflector is a disassembler for .Net provided by the lovely people at Redgate. It’s so good that it seems almost magical in its power. Previously if I wanted to poke around in a dll then I’d use MSIL disassembler (ildasm.exe) and then feel all manly that I was interfacing directly with the intermediate language code. Since I was feeling all scientific I whipped up a quick test class to compare the two.

The test class

using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;

namespace TestProject
{
 /// <summary>
 /// Test Class
 /// </summary>
 public class TestClass
 {
  private int _testInt;

  /// <summary>
  /// Test Int
  /// </summary>
  public int TestInt
  {
   get { return _testInt * 6; }
  }

  private string _testString;

  /// <summary>
  /// Test String
  /// </summary>

  public string TestString
  {
   get { return _testString; }
   set { _testString = value; }
  }
 
  /// <summary>
  /// Test Class
  /// </summary>

  public TestClass()
  {
   _testString = "TechSplurge";
   _testInt = 99;
  }

  /// <summary>
  /// Test Method
  /// </summary>
  /// <param name="maxCount"></param>
  /// <returns></returns>
  public void TestMethod(int maxCount)
  {
   for(int i=0;i<maxCount;i++)
   {
    Console.WriteLine(_testString + i.ToString());
   }
   Console.WriteLine("End");
  }
}
}

With Ildasm

It’s a bit cryptic in there. Let’s look at the manifest






OK I can see namespaces but the rest is mysterious


With Reflector



Wow – the scales have fallen from my eyes and I see real code buried in the dll.

In fairness it’s a little like comparing apples with oranges. Ildasm.exe is for looking at what the code actually does once it’s been compiled - useful when really going for performance tweaks. Reflector is for seeing what the programmer intended and for seeing how on earth that third party dll works.