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! :-)