Wouter

Not sure if all the readers of this blog are aware of this tool. Probably most developers know the old .NET Reflector by Lutz Roeder. He passed the baton to Red Gate Software who added a professional version making it even more of a must-have tool for SharePoint developers. The reason? Take a look at the following screenshot. Notice how I was able to set a breakpoint right inside a SharePoint DLL!

Can it be much cooler?

Actually the answer to that last question is 'yes it could'. You still cannot read or debug obfuscated code in a higher level language. We all know the dreaded 'stop debugging here' message in Reflector.

Perhaps you don't know, but using the plain vanilla .NET Reflector you can actually see the obfuscated code but only in its native form of Intermediate Language (IL). Takes a bit of effort, but you can sure find out how things work. Just open Reflector and in the language dropdown choose IL and presto!

Personally I have my own homebrew IL parser that clears up a bit of the 'goto' type jumping that happens a lot at the IL level, meaning I get a better view of IL than you get out of Reflector itself.

Hope it helps! Now go buy it, or if you are an MVP.....(I actually bought mine,sigh).