Lutz Roeder's .NET Reflector Headed to Red Gate Software

Posted by Robert Bazinet on Aug 21, 2008

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Reflection

The very popular .NET developer utility, .NET Reflector, written by Lutz Roeder is being taken over by Red Gate Software. The news was announced on Lutz's blog and the download was immediately available on the Red Gate web site.

Lutz gave the reason for the change and the new owner:

After more than eight years of working on .NET Reflector, I have decided it is time to move on and explore some new opportunities.

I have reached an agreement to have Red Gate Software continue the development of .NET Reflector. Red Gate has a lot of experience creating tools for both .NET and SQL Server. They have the resources necessary to work on new features, and Reflector fits nicely with other .NET tools the company offers.

Red Gate will continue to provide the free community version and is looking for your feedback and ideas for future versions.

The good news for developers is the continued availability of a free, community version. An interview between Lutz and James Moore, the general manager of .NET Developer Tools at Red Gate, for the Simple Talk newsletter produced by Red Gate details how the acquisition came about and what it means for the future of Reflector. James' view of the acquisition should give developers a good feeling about the future of the popular tool:

“I think we can provide a level of resources that will move the tool forward in a big way. The first thing we are doing is continuing to offer the software to the community for free downloading. The second thing is giving our product management and usability teams the task of going out into the community to get suggestions on how we can make this amazing tool even better.

We accept the fact that there will be scepticism, but we can point to a good track record of support for the community. People were wary a couple of years ago when we purchased the SQL Server Central community site, but over time we have won over many of our critics by investing heavily in the site and boosting its readership, while allowing it to maintain editorial independence. I’m hoping I will be able to sit here in a few years time and claim the same level of success with Reflector.”

Reflector version 5.1.3 is the latest and is described as:

.NET Reflector enables you to easily view, navigate, and search through the class hierarchies of .NET assemblies even if you don't have the code for them. With it, you can decompile and analyze .NET assemblies in C#, Visual Basic and IL.

Use Reflector if you need to:

* Explore .NET assemblies in an easy-to-understand, natural way

* Understand the relationships between classes and methods

* Find where types are instantiated and exposed

* Check that your code has been correctly obfuscated before release

More information about Reflector can be found on the Red Gate Software web site.

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   Thats not good...

   by Francois Ward

   I hope the community version is good, because Reflector is a completly invaluable tool for .NET development. Not -as- useful in .NET 3.5, since we have access to the source code of the framework, but ofr .NET 2.0 development, it was fairly critical to find all of the silly bugs Microsoft is leaving in the core framework to "maintain backward compatibility" and to "document" third party tools where documentation is sparse.
   
   
   
   Considering what happened with SQL Prompt, I'm a bit scared (even though this is different, community version and all), but we'll see.

   Reply

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   Opinions vary

   by chris barrow

   Have a look at this
   post. I think it sums up the fear and worries about the acquisition.

   Reply

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