Today I’m glad to announce that thanks to Github “project pages” feature I am able to host beta builds of “IL.View” that can be consumed both in browswer and out of browser.
You can browse and/or install IL.View by navigating this link: http://denisvuyka.github.com/IL.View
What’s new in the deployed build:
I have added an experimental support for Silverlight “.xap” packages. It will be possible to drop a “.xap” file onto IL.View surface and navigate it’s content within assembly browser like shown below:
Just have to note that the implementation of “.xap” browsing is in its early stage and is not feature complete.
What’s on the way:
Many features related to MEF framework. I’m a greatest fan of MEF and use it every day in the production. There’s some tooling that I would like to integrate into IL.View like displaying all the MEF imports/exports for the particular assembly, etc. More content viewers are pending (xaml/xml, images, etc.)
Suggestions, issues and feedbacks?
I would really appreciate to get them registered here: IL.View Issues
Very good job!
One thing that you might think of is UI. Reflector was good for when it’s started, but by now it is an ugly hideousness. Pulling a bright skin onto it makes it a bit sweeter, but it’s still nowhere close to the usabilty that users have come to expect lately. You have to click and click and expand and exercise your wrist as if you’re using Explorer in Win95 era
Another is even more tough to pull off. Mono.Cecil is slightly shabby with duplication and unnecessary direct/delayed modes — but ICSharpCode manages to be even fatter. It’s nothing to do with your code, but I wish there was a decompiler that just did its decompiling job rather that try to be a refactoring tool and a pattern matching engine and a kitchen sink. I know it’s not visible to the user of IL.View, but I bet it slows down the process.
Thanks for the feedbacks. I cannot agree more with your concerns. To be honest I have absolutely no intention to create “another Reflector clone”. I’m more interested in the code analysis and rich code/dependency visualization, including many UI features I’ve been missing for a long time with Reflector. However to start doing cool things I have to ensure the basic (and expected) functionality is working as expected. New blog posts unveling new features are on the way
Regards,
Denis
Very good blog, I have learned many cool things from it. Though I agree with mihailik comment, UI needs to be improved somewhat.
P.S. Feel free to visit my blog at http://victorlapin.wordpress.com