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.NET assemblies (plugins/dotnet)

f4#1666: a .NET assembly opened as a read-only tree in a file panel, in the spirit of an assembly browser.

Put the cursor on a .dll or .exe that holds .NET metadata and press Ctrl+PgDn (Enter is left alone). The file is only read, through internal/dotnet; nothing in it is loaded or run. A file without .NET metadata is not opened this way.

The tree

  • assembly.md: the report: assembly name and version, culture, the runtime version the metadata asks for, the referenced assemblies, the types by namespace and the resource names (each list is cut off after a few hundred entries, with "and N more").
  • References/: one entry per referenced assembly, named <name> <version>. A reference whose file lies next to the assembly (the way the runtime finds a private dependency) is a folder holding that assembly's own tree, read when it is first opened, so you can walk from one assembly to the next. Following stops after six steps and never re-enters an assembly already on the way. A reference that is not found is a small text file with its name and version.
  • Namespaces/<namespace>/: for every type a text file <type> and, when its methods have bodies, <type>.il. The types of the global namespace sit under (global), and a nested type is listed beside its outer type as Outer+Inner.
    • <type> lists the type's attributes ([Name]), then its members in metadata order: methods with their signatures, fields with their types and names, and other members (properties, events) by name, each with its own attributes.
    • <type>.il holds the IL of every method with a body: instructions, branch targets, locals and named generic instantiations. ReadyToRun (precompiled) images are read through the IL they still carry.
  • Resources/: the embedded resources. One stored in the file is readable with its bytes (F3); one that is not is a short note saying so.

Everything is read-only: F3 shows a listing, F5 copies it out as text, and nothing can be written into the tree.

Limits

  • The IL text of one assembly is bounded; once the budget is spent the remaining types keep their signatures, and the .il files say the rest was left out.
  • Only the types of custom attributes are shown, not their arguments (the value blob is not decoded yet), and generic parameter constraints are not listed yet.
  • Nothing is decompiled to C#.