July 2008
Intermediate to advanced
1026 pages
27h 59m
English
Content preview from Professional Visual Studio® 2008
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
29.2. Decompilers
One of the most widely used decompilers is Reflector for .NET by Lutz Roeder (available for download at www.aisto.com/roeder/dotnet/). Reflector can be used to decompile any .NET assembly into C#, Visual Basic, Managed C++, and even Delphi. In Figure 29-3, the same assembly you just accessed is opened using IL Dasm, in Reflector.
Figure 29.3. Figure 29-3
In the pane on the left of Figure 29-3, you can see the namespaces, type, and method information in a layout similar to IL Dasm. Double-clicking a method should open the Disassembler pane on the right, which will display the contents of that method in the language specified in the Toolbar. In this case, you can see the Visual Basic code that generates the magic number, which is almost identical to the original code.
You may have noticed in Figure 29-3 that some of the .NET Framework base class library assemblies are listed, including System, System.Data, and System.Web. Because obfuscation has not been applied to these assemblies, they can be decompiled just as easily using Reflector. However, in early 2008, Microsoft made large portions of the actual .NET Framework source code publically available, which means you can browse the original source code of these assemblies including the inline comments. This is shown in Chapter 43.
If the generation of the magic number were a real secret on which your organization ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.