I touched on decompilers in an entry last year. And it was also noted that the creator of Reflector was one of my top most influential .NET individuals. But I never paid tribute to a free plugin for Lutz Roeder's Reflector called "FileDisassembler".
Like the title of this blog entry, this tool is almost like the poor man's decompiler and code recovery haven. This comes in comparison to the price tag for RemoteSoft's Salamander .NET Decompiler. Although, this is not entirely correct as Huihong Luo does provide a free online express version at http://www.remotesoft.com/salamander/index.html.
In the past, FileDisassembler has proven to come in handy in the following scenarios:
- recovery of source code where the only artifacts that remain are the dlls
- quick, cheap and dirty port of .NET application from one language to another
- in large organizations, waiting to be granted repository access from another team be take a little time. Instead, to quickly troubleshoot dlls belonging to other teams, you can regenerate the project and source files based on the dll. Now you are free to alter bits of code here and there and debug to your hearts desire.
- for curiosity sake, you wanted to play around with source files from the BCL (Base Class Library). =)
- you decided to use this tool for evil after you got a hold of your competitor's resources and decided you wanted a project file and source to start working with.
- you had time on your hands and randomly loaded up exe files to A) see if it was managed code B) attempt to generate project and source files from it. HINT: executable needs to contain a CLI header to be recognized.
- you realized that Reflector is an indispensible developer tool and understood its value in allowing people to learn (by studying other's code). And like any hands-on type of individual, you wanted to take that to the next level by generating the files so that you could play around with your study material.
I am sure there are many other interesting ways and motivating factors for using Disassembler. Feel free to add any to this list.