Without having the original source code, decompiling .NET applications seems the only logical way to analyze the project. Is it still so?

Decompiling has been the only way to analyze compiled applications written in various programming languages. With todays high-level programming languages, however, decompiling produces a huge amount of garbage code that accounts for routine calls, procedures and headers implemented by the many libraries and components used in typical applications. Disassembling an average .NET assembly can produce thousands if not millions lines of code.

Believe it or not, this level of application analysis is often redundant. With .NET applications specifically, a new mechanism has been implemented to simplify their analysis. The .NET reflection mechanism allows extracting metadata of .NET assemblies in order to analyze project metadata such as namespaces, data types and type members, attributes, and keys. By using reflection, it is possible to get a fully visual presentation of all project dependencies in just a moment.

.NET Metadata Expert developed by Creomate uses the reflection mechanism to make .NET analysis easy. Instead of disassembling .NET applications, .NET Metadata Expert offers developers a quick look over project metadata complete with inheritances and dependencies. The tool employs a variety of inheritance trees to visually display the numerous types used in .NET assemblies

The tool links dependent assemblies, builds hierarchies and draws inheritance trees completely automatically. There are several views available to provide convenient presentation of various data. The views available include inheritance tree, nesting tree, construction tree, and a unique combined view that displays the inheritance tree as well as the type members.

.NET Metadata Expert offers developers all the convenience of todays development environments, including quick searching, grouping and filtering with a number of advanced options, search highlighting and ultra-fast performance. .NET Metadata Expert supports all 32-bit and 64-bit versions of .NET Framework 2.0, 3.0, 3.5 and 4.0, and recognizes popular templates such as WPF, WCF, WF, WinForms, ADO.NET, and ASP.NET.

.NET Metadata Expert is a great convenience tool not to be overlooked by any serious .NET developer. The free trial version can be downloaded at http://creomate.com/en/download.htm