BitDiffer, anyone? - ISerializable - Roy Osherove's Blog

BitDiffer, anyone?

Note to self: check out BitDiffer. Looks pretty awesome.

"Ever wonder what really changed in that DLL you are about to release to production? Would you like to check a 3rd party library for breaking changes before referencing it? Would it be helpful to integrate an automatically generated change report - at the assembly binary level - in your deployment and migration process?

BitDiffer allows you to compare multiple versions of assemblies for all types of changes and drill down to find the smallest changes, public or private."

Anyone used it? know any comparable tools?

 

update: I found this one on Jeremy Miller's blog. it has a Lunge ad on the top left (codebetter.com actually has it). Hmm. Perhaps Typemock should be advertising over at the lounge too...hmm?

Published Tuesday, January 15, 2008 4:34 PM by RoyOsherove
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Comments

Tuesday, January 15, 2008 5:37 PM by Claudio Lassala

# re: BitDiffer, anyone?

NDepend can do that, and I *think* there's an add-on for .NET Reflector that does that too. I haven't played with those myself yet, though.

Tuesday, January 15, 2008 6:15 PM by El Guapo

# re: BitDiffer, anyone?

Reflector can sort of do an assembly compare, but the plugin is very rudimentary and limited. I haven't tried NDepend.

Wednesday, January 16, 2008 2:20 AM by Arjan Zuidhof

# re: BitDiffer, anyone?

@El Guapo: 'Assembly diff' the Reflextor addin is available at www.codingsanity.com/diff.htm. It looks nice, though a bit brittle maybe.

The BitDiffer screenshots look like that tool offers a much slicker interface at least

Wednesday, January 16, 2008 2:28 AM by John Rusk

# re: BitDiffer, anyone?

Another option with Reflector is to disassemble to files (that plug-in works fine, in my experience) then to diff the files.

Thursday, January 17, 2008 6:38 AM by NinjaCross

# re: BitDiffer, anyone?

It seems interesting, but I fully agree with John Rusk.

60$ for a Single User licence is too expensive for a tool that can be easily replaced by a disassemble/compare done with free stuff like WinMerge or KDiff.

Obviously an integrated tool is better that a multi-step solution executed with different softwares, but the in this way it's much more flexible since you are not constrained by the integrated tool limitations

Friday, February 01, 2008 12:20 PM by JohnDhom

# re: BitDiffer, anyone?

MS LibCheck can store/diff assembly APIs. Will take a look at BitDiffer.

Going to integrate this into our build process... diff CI build APIs to last release. Good info for dev and qa.

You guys automate the reflector or winmerge diffs?

/jhd