Researching .net Assemblies Without Disassembling

Without having access to the source code, disassembling .NET applications used to be the only logical way to analyze the project. Is it really so?

Disassembling used to be the only way to analyze compiled programs written in various programming languages. With todays high-level programming languages, however, disassembling produces a humongous amount of garbage code that accounts for standard functions, procedures and headers implemented by the many libraries and components used in typical programs. Decompiling a typical .NET application can result in thousands if not millions lines of code.

More often than not, this level of code analysis is redundant. With .NET assemblies in particular, a different mechanism has been developed to streamline their analysis. The .NET reflection mechanism allows extracting metadata of .NET assemblies in order to analyze project metadata including namespaces, data types and type members, attributes, and keys. By using reflection, it is possible to get a completely visual presentation of all project dependencies in just a moment.

.NET Metadata Expert by Creomate http://creomate.com employs the reflection mechanism to make metadata analysis easy. Instead of decompiling .NET assemblies, .NET Metadata Expert offers developers a quick look over project metadata complete with inheritances and dependencies. .NET Metadata Expert uses a number of inheritance trees to visually represent the many types used in .NET applications.

.NET Metadata Expert links dependent assemblies, creates hierarchies and draws inheritance trees fully automatically. There are several views available to provide convenient presentation of various data. The views available include inheritance tree, nesting tree, construction tree, and a unique combined view that displays the original inheritance tree as well as the type members.

The tool brings all the convenience of todays development environments, including quick searching, grouping and filtering with many advanced options, search highlighting and ultra-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 any serious .NET developer. The free evaluation version is available at http://creomate.com/en/download.htm