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As I was writing in my last entry, announcing the most awesome Cecil.Decompiler library, I took my last week off to host a CodeCamp event at my parents place in the quite place of Ardèche, France. I had the pleasure to host, by order of arrival, Romain Verdier Patrice Lamarche Vincent Bourdon Robert Pickering Mathieu ...

At the beginning, Cecil was written to be an assembly manipulation library. The initial goal was to be able to read assemblies without loading them in an AppDomain, and also, to expose more that what .net 1.1 provided. I implemented the writing parts of Cecil during my first Summer of Code, and barely touched it after, at it turns out it was ...

My friend Patrick, who’s leading the amazing NDepend effort wrote a great post comparing Cecil against the built-in System.Reflection: Mono.Cecil vs System.Reflection Thanks Patrick for the kind words!

Yeah, time for a new release of Mono.Cecil. New since 0.5: A lot of work to read obfuscated assemblies, Some precious optimizations, Improved the Mono.Cecil.Binary layer to read pure native PE binaries, Ability to annotate Cecil’s objects, Of course fixed a handful of bugs, Add a lot or helpers accessors to Cecil’s ...

Eight days ago, I’ve blogged about an issue involving Cecil and ildasm. And the last security update to the .net framework. After a few hours of investigation, I’ve managed to be able to reproduce the ildasm crash. It turns out that the security update is actually not involved in the issue. It’s just that I stumbled upon ...

Yesterday night was filled with emotion. After more than two years in its own module in SVN, the library Mono.Cecil have moved a shiner place, right where the core assemblies are, in the mcs module. Dear Cecil users, you’ll now have to check Cecil out from mcs/class/Mono.Cecil. Yet, Cecil’s API is not set in stone, so if ...

Since the last security update of the .net 2 framework, ildasm may have some issues with assemblies emitted by Cecil. This goes from a pure ildasm crash, to methods that can’t be disassembled. Plus, the behavior is sometimes random. That’s clearly a regression in ildasm, because it used to work, and other disassembler are able to ...

Two weeks ago, I’ve borrowed a concept I’ve first seen in Boo to use it in Cecil. As the title of this entry kindly suggests, it’s about something called annotations. The need for them came from my work on the linker. Before using annotations, to decide which elements to link, I’ve re-created a tree of objects called ...

The linker is a static tool. It uses Mono.Cecil to analyze the assemblies, modify them, and save them back in a linked form. That means that the linker can only know about the assemblies and the types that are statically referenced. You already see where I’m going to. Mono, just like .net, provides very interesting, and also widely used, ...

These last days, I’ve been working on a little framework based both on Boo and NUnit called Bat. Bat stands for Boo Assembly Tester, and is attended to simplify the creation of unit tests for everything Cecil based. For instance, let say I want to test the way Cecil emits assemblies, with a very simple Hello World assembly, here is the ...