subject: Visualizing .NET Assemblies without Decompiling [print this page] Visualizing .NET Assemblies without Decompiling
Without having the original source code, decompiling .NET assemblies seems the only logical way to analyze the project. Is it really so?
Decompiling used to be the only way to analyze binary programs written in various programming languages. With todays high-level programming languages, however, decompiling produces a huge amount of garbage code that accounts for standard calls, procedures and headers implemented by the many libraries and components used in typical programs. Disassembling a typical .NET assembly can produce thousands if not millions lines of code.
Believe it or not, this level of code analysis is often redundant. With .NET assemblies in particular, a different mechanism has been developed to streamline their analysis. The .NET reflection mechanism allows accessing metadata of .NET assemblies in order to analyze project metadata such as namespaces, data types and type members, attributes, and keys. By using reflection, it is possible to get a fully visual presentation of all project dependencies in just a few moments.
.NET Metadata Expert by Creomate http://creomate.com employs the reflection mechanism to make .NET analysis easy. Instead of disassembling .NET assemblies, .NET Metadata Expert offers developers a quick glance over project metadata with all inheritances and dependencies. .NET Metadata Expert uses a number of inheritance trees to visually display the many types used in .NET applications.
.NET Metadata Expert links dependent assemblies, builds hierarchies and draws inheritance trees completely automatically. There are multiple views available to provide convenient presentation of various data. The views available include inheritance tree, nesting tree, construction tree, and a unique combined view displaying the original inheritance tree as well as the type members.
The tool offers developers all the convenience of todays development environments, including quick searching, grouping and filtering with a number of advanced options, search highlighting and ultra-fast performance. .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 popular templates such as 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. The free trial version can be downloaded at http://creomate.com/en/download.htm
