.NET Common Language Runtime Unleashed

Summary

This chapter showed the importance of the assembly and the metadata within it. Metadata allows for many features within a programming environment that would not be possible without it. To use metadata, you must be able to access it. This chapter showed two methods to look at the metadata. The first method uses a set of unmanaged COM APIs that should be suitable for most applications. These COM APIs contain sufficient detail to crack most assembly metadata. If you require a more detailed description of the metadata or you cannot depend on a COM component in your program, then you might want to crack the physical layout of the assembly to get at the metadata information.