Thursday 20 October 2011

If you want to view a Assembly how do you go about it ?

What is ILDASM ?

When it comes to understanding of internals nothing can beat ILDASM. ILDASM basically converts the whole exe or dll in to IL code. To run ILDASM you have to go to "C:\Program Files\MicrosoftVisual Studio .NET 2008\SDK\v1.1\Bin". Note that i had v1.1 you have to probably change it depending on the type of framework version you have.

If you run IDASM.EXE from the path you will be popped with the IDASM exe program as shown in figure ILDASM. Click on file and browse to the respective directory for the DLL whose assembly you want to view. After you select the DLL you will be popped with a tree view details of the DLL as shown in figure ILDASM. On double clicking on manifest you will be able to view details of assembly, internal IL code etc as shown in Figure Manifest View.

Note : The version number are in the manifest itself which is defined with the DLL or EXE thus making deployment much easier as compared to COM where the information was stored in registry. Note the version information in Figure Manifest view.


You can expand the tree for detail information regarding the DLL like methods etc.

 ILDASM


Manifest View

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