What is .NET Reflector?
.NET Reflector is a .NET decompilation tool originally created by Lutz Roeder. It enables developers to inspect, navigate, query, and analyze .NET managed code in Visual Studio, without the need for symbols or source code. Some key features of .NET Reflector include:
- Decompiling .NET assemblies into C# or Visual Basic code to understand structure and behavior
- Analyzing dependencies between types and assemblies
- Browsing metadata and IL code with syntax highlighting
- Searching for usages of APIs across assemblies
- Plugin architecture to enhance functionality
- Integrations with Visual Studio to bring Reflector capabilities right into the IDE
- Analyzing assemblies for potential security issues
- Comparing differences between two .NET assemblies
.NET Reflector is useful for developers to debug assemblies without symbols, reverse engineer third party libraries to understand internal structure, ensure security of their code, and learn from others' implementation techniques by examining open source .NET code. It has an intuitive graphical interface making complex managed code easy to interpret.