Researching .NET Assemblies without Decompiling- By: Creomate Software

Description : Without having access to the source code, disassembling .NET assemblies used to be the only logical way to research the project. Is it still so?

Disassembling has been the only way to research compiled programs written in many programming languages. With modern high-level programming languages, however, disassembling produces a humongous amount of garbage code that accounts for routine functions, procedures and containers implemented by the many libraries and components used in typical programs. Decompiling an average .NET application can result in thousands if not millions lines of code.

More often than not, such a comprehensive application analysis is redundant. With .NET applications in particular, a new mechanism has been developed to simplify their analysis. The .NET reflection mechanism allows accessing metadata dependencies of .NET assemblies in order to analyze project metadata including namespaces, data types and type members, attributes, and keys. By using reflection, one can get a completely visual presentation of all project dependencies in just a moment.

.NET Metadata Expert by Creomate uses the reflection mechanism to make metadata analysis easy. Instead of decompiling .NET applications, .NET Metadata Expert offers developers a quick glance over project metadata complete with inheritances and dependencies. The tool employs a variety of inheritance trees to visually represent the numerous types used in .NET assemblies.

The tool links dependent assemblies, creates hierarchies and produces inheritance trees fully automatically. There are several views available to offer convenient presentation of various data. The views available include inheritance tree, nesting tree, construction tree, and a unique combined view that displays the inheritance tree and the type members.

.NET Metadata Expert brings all the convenience of modern development environments, including fast, grouping and filtering with many advanced options, search highlighting and blazing-fast operation speed. .NET Metadata Expert supports all 32-bit and 64-bit versions of .NET Framework 2.0, 3.0, 3.5 and 4.0, and recognizes projects including WPF, WCF, WF, WinForms, ADO.NET, and ASP.NET.

.NET Metadata Expert is a great convenience tool not to be overlooked by serious .NET developers.

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Author Resource : Founded in 2007, Creomate specializes in making tools for .NET developers. Producing highly usable, point-and-click solutions, the company offers developers a set of convenience tools for working with .NET projects of any size and complexity.