Chapter 12. Reversing .NET
This book has so far focused on just one reverse-engineering platform: native code written for IA-32 and compatible processors. Even though there are many programs that fall under this category, it still makes sense to discuss other, emerging development platforms that might become more popular in the future. There are endless numbers of such platforms. I could discuss other operating systems that run under IA-32 such as Linux, or discuss other platforms that use entirely different operating systems and different processor architectures, such as Apple Macintosh. Beyond operating systems and processor architectures, there are also high-level platforms that use a special assembly language of their own, and can run under any platform. These are virtual-machine-based platforms such as Java and .NET.
Even though Java has grown to be an extremely powerful and popular programming language, this chapter focuses exclusively on Microsoft's .NET platform. There are several reasons why I chose .NET over Java. First of all, Java has been around longer than .NET, and the subject of Java reverse engineering has been covered quite extensively in various articles and online resources. Additionally, I think it would be fair to say that Microsoft technologies have a general tendency of attracting large numbers of hackers and reversers. The reason why that is so is the subject of some debate, and I won't get into it here.
In this chapter, I will be covering the basic techniques ...
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