As you may have probably noticed by now, a week ago, Microsoft released the source code for an IL CodeDOM Provider. I was interested in trying some stuff using the bits but I found several issues with them:
- The code doesn’t compile AS IS with the current public Whidbey bits.
- There is no reference in the doco to which Whidbey build is supposed to be used.
- The doco (word document) have some reviewer comments left (made by “Fernando Lakshan”) dated July 2004, like reviewing was never finished.
- The doco ends with an incomplete phrase, giving a strong impression that it just plain incomplete.
- There is a mention for a typereflection.vsd file that is not bundled in the distro.
All this is crying for another release… and I would love to try a few things if a usable download is ever made available.
Unless you’re living under a rock you should have already heard about Reflector.
Good news is that the best utility for .NET ever created still continues to improve day after day. Lutz has just released Reflector version 4.0 which includes the following (these are just the new features I like most):
No reflection is being used – there is a new code model library. On the pros side, this basically means that the tedious file locking problems should go away. On the cons side, this means Reflector now likes to eat lots of more memory :-)
Whidbey support!! – A major hurra! for this one. All Whidbey new features are now supported (i.e. generics, etc). Plus… you can even load a Whidbey assembly with no Whidbey installed… what more do you want ugh?
Side by side versioning: this wasn’t possible in previous Reflection versions; now you can load for example v1.0 of System.Web.dll along with v1.1 of System.Web.dll; hint: stay away from loading multiple versions of mscorlib.dll, bad things will happen if you don’t.
For the last months I’ve been receiving drops of the beta from Lutz, giving some feedback, and discussing some of the pros and cons of the new “code model”… it was a really good experience!
Thanks Lutz for this excellent tool!!
