Telerik blogs

There are many reasons why you would want to decompile an assembly with Telerik JustDecompile. Perhaps you’re curious about the inner workings of a particular reference, or maybe you’re looking for interesting techniques. But when you’re trying to solve an issue, you need to be able to quickly find what’s going wrong. 

The Search Window

The new search window is accessible through the common shortcut for the find dialog: ctrl+f.

 image

This dialog provides three different types of search methods: by type, by symbol, and full text. With full text search, you can search the currently selected assembly or through all loaded assemblies.

Perhaps I’m curious why a boolean is converted to ‘True’ instead of ‘true’. It’s a minor annoyance for xml writing, and knowing if there’s a way to control the manner in which the .NET framework converts this value could be handy for finding an elegant solution.

I select mscorlib in the navigation tree, then type “True” in the search box.

image

 

The results indicate that ‘True’ is hard-coded in ToString(), but I double-click the ToString() method in the grid to verify this information. JustDecompile automatically navigates to this member, and I know I will need to convert the string to lowercase myself.

Performing a full text search on all assemblies can be time consuming depending on the number and size of the loaded assemblies. Luckily, searching by type and by symbol are lightning fast! This is useful when you know the name of the type or member. These searches work the same way: type the symbol or type in the search box, and JustDecompile automatically searches the loaded assemblies.

I needed to find a particular member with a name similar to ‘boxed’. As I started typing, JustDecompile created the list and began filtering it. The final result contained the member I was searching for: System.Lazy`1.m_boxed.

image

What’s Next

We are headed toward the Q1 2012 release of JustDecompile, and you can be assured that we will continue to add features you’ve requested on User Voice. The site is easy to access from within JustDecompile; just click the “Suggest Feature…” button in the upper-right corner.

image

Happy Decompiling!

The JustDecompile team


About the Author

Chris Eargle

is a Microsoft C# MVP with over a decade of experience designing and developing enterprise applications, and he runs the local .NET User Group: the Columbia Enterprise Developers Guild. He is a frequent guest of conferences and community events promoting best practices and new technologies. Chris is a native Carolinian; his family settled the Dutch Form region of South Carolina in 1752. He currently resides in Columbia with his wife, Binyue, his dog, Laika, and his three cats: Meeko, Tigger, and Sookie. Amazingly, they all get along... except for Meeko, who is by no means meek.

Comments

Comments are disabled in preview mode.