Reflector 5: The Best Tool Ever Got Even Better!
I just received a ping by IM from Lutz with the news.
I quickly downloaded the bits and I had a quick try.
Lots of new stuff in the box.
My favorite one so far is the enhanced Analyzer feature
which gives you “Exposed by”, “Instantiated by” and “Assigned by”. With these
new powerful searches you can select a type and quickly see who exposes it,
where it is instantiated, where it is being assigned (for members), etc. This
should *really* speed you up when you’re making your way through understanding the
decompiled code!!
The UI also received some attention, you can now display
several windows on the right panel, which is great for having a source code view
plus the results of some analyzer search ran on it. Multiple analyzer searches
are also supported on the same window, they will just stack up and you can
delete them as you wish.
Support for C# 3.0 is in too (Link query and lambda expression)
although I haven’t had a chance to test how well this works yet.
And lastly, I like the better shell integration which
consists of two very nice goodies:
1) there is a new “code://” protocol which takes a
custom syntax for referencing a .Net type, so you can now open links as “code://System.Web/System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebControl”
which will open up Reflector and automatically navigate to that type. Of
course, you can use these links in html pages, emails and IM to quickly point
your pal to a given type, now-that-is-cool.
2)
I think I did wait for this one for the last
four years… you run reflector.exe /register and it will register the DLL
extension with Reflector, so now, everytime you right click on a managed DLL
you will get a “Browse with .NET Reflector”
option in the context menu that when selected will recycle the currently opened Reflector instance: yes!, yes!, yes!.
And there is even more new stuff in v5, so go download the free gem and
discover it for yourself! :-)