So, I get the “hot off the presses news” that Reflector 4.0 was released yesterday. I download, and of course, it’s an excellent upgrade. What I didn’t realize, though, is that there’s a Visual Studio .NET plugin for Reflector, which makes it all the more useful to me now.
Here you can see Reflector embedded into Visual Studio, with not only the .NET 1.1 libraries loaded, but also a good number of the 3rd party components that I use on a regular basis. I’ve also showed the outline view for NUnit.Framework, just to show you what it looks like.
I find that, as often as not, the Outline view is exactly what I need… a nice overview of the classes and their functionality, without having to fire up some help file and navigate it. The fact that it can decompile the classes into source code is almost a secondary benefit now that’s usually limited to system library implementation spelunking.