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Viewing Assembly Metadata (a.k.a. the Manifest)

Finally, if you are interested in viewing the contents of the assembly’s manifest, simply double-click

the MANIFEST icon (see Figure 1-10).

Figure 1-10.

Viewing manifest data via ildasm.exe.

To be sure, ildasm.exe has more options than shown here, and I will illustrate additional fea-

tures of the tool where appropriate in the text.

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Exploring an Assembly Using Lutz Roeder’s

Reflector

While using ildasm.exe is a very common task when you wish to dig into the guts of a .NET binary,

the one gotcha is that you are only able to view the underlying CIL code, rather than looking at an

assembly’s implementation using your managed language of choice. Thankfully, many .NET object

browsers are available for download, including the very popular Reflector.

This free tool can be downloaded from http://www.aisto.com/roeder/dotnet. Once you have

unzipped the archive, you are able to run the tool and plug in any assembly you wish using the

File ➤ Open menu option. Figure 1-11 shows our Calc.exe application once again.

Figure 1-11.

Reflector is a very popular object browsing tool.

Notice that reflector.exe supports a Disassembler window (opened by pressing the spacebar)

as well as a drop-down list box that allows you to view the underlying code base in your language of

choice (including, of course, CIL code).

I’ll leave it up to you to check out the number of intriguing features found within this tool. Do

be aware that over the course of the remainder of the book, I’ll make use of both ildasm.exe as well

as reflector.exe to illustrate various concepts.