Listen, if you get a chance to hear Joel Pobar (CLR PM) talk make sure you do it. This guy knows his stuff. His cabana talk tonight focused on Reflection Best Practices. Cabana #6 was packed and for good reason. He took us deep into reflection, perf, CLR parsing of assembly meta-data and proper technique. Honestly, and this is just my opinion, I believe Joel is one of the most knowledgeable speakers I’ve had the pleasure to hear. If you want to know the inner workings of the CLR I believe this is your guy. If you catch him around the cabanas tomorrow and you have questions about the CLR you should grab him. I also recommend checking out his blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/joelpob/. You won’t be sorry.
On a side note, someone asked during the session if obfuscated code (don’t remember how we got on this topic) could be debugged via stack traces returned from the field. While the answer given was no, or at least that it was very difficult, that’s not entirely correct. If you obfuscate with the PreEmptive tool (either Standard or Professional) it will output a translation file ( I can’t remember what they call the file) that can be used to translate your stack trace from the field into usable information that you can debug just as you would non-obfuscated code. The PreEmptive team at booth 1041 can explain this a lot better. I recommend you check this out. .NET code protection is something we all need to take a look at and I believe the PreEmptive folks go to great lengths to make it as painless for us as possible.