Telerik Promises a Free .NET Decompiler Forever

by Abel Avram on May 10, 2011 |

Telerik, a company making .NET and Agile development tools, has announced that JustDecompile, a code browsing and decompiling tool, will be made available for free, forever.

.NET Reflector, a well-known decompiling tool for .NET assemblies, was once free but RedGate decided to charge money for it earlier this year because “owning Reflector doesn’t make commercial sense”, according Simon Galbraith, co-founder of RedGate. The tool comes now in three versions, the cheapest one being Standard ($35), a standalone Windows application offering browsing, analyzing and decompiling .NET code to C#, VB.NET or IL. The free version has a time bomb set to go off on May 31, 2011.

Perhaps as a reaction to RedGate’s decision, Telerik promises “Free Decompiling. Forever.” Telerik sells JustCode, a code analysis Visual Studio productivity add-in, and one of its features is to decompile .NET assemblies. Now, the company has decided to make that feature available in a free stand-alone Windows tool, called JustDecompile, for those interested in decompiling code. JustDecompile can be used to analyze entire types of the assemblies loaded or external assemblies referenced. The tool can decompile lambda expressions, generics, yield statements, and auto-generated properties.

Currently in beta, the version 1.0 of the tool will be released in the summer of this year. In the meantime, developers are invited to test it and submit bugs, and to suggest new features. The most voted features desired so far are: “Allow assembly editing”, “Create project in Visual Studio from assembly”, a feature that Telerik says it will be included in v. 1.0, “Support Silverlight XAP decompiling”, and “Add an API for plugins”. The company also promises JustDecompile will be “updated frequently during the BETA, and will receive 3 major updates per year” in the future, plus support via the forums.

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Community comments

This is interesting.. by Roopesh Shenoy Posted

Open source alternative : ILSpy by Merouane Atig Posted

Re: Open source alternative : ILSpy by 段永明 Posted

And additionally... by Francois Ward Posted

Why not just open source it? by Roopesh Shenoy Posted

Re: And additionally... by José Joye Posted

Reflector 6 is now free forever by Matthieu DUFOURNEAUD-RAVEL Posted

This is interesting.. by Roopesh Shenoy

Especially as you mentioned, in light of RedGate's view. Especially creating project in Visual Studio from an Assembly. Wonder if this is a loss-leader strategy.

Open source alternative : ILSpy by Merouane Atig

The SharpDevelop team is also working on an open source alternative to .NET Reflector. You can have more information on their wiki page wiki.sharpdevelop.net/ilspy.ashx.

And additionally... by Francois Ward

On top of all that, Resharper is supposed to add decompilation in the next version. Considering how many people use Resharper...

Why not just open source it? by Roopesh Shenoy

Why not just have one open source decompiler? Does not make sense everyone working on their own version, especially if they are giving it away free anyways.

Hackers should never have to solve the same problem twice.

Re: Open source alternative : ILSpy by 段永明

Already using ILSpy from it's start, although it's still need more improvement

Re: And additionally... by José Joye

A free Decompiler is already available from JetBrains. See at www.jetbrains.com/decompiler/index.html?topDP

Reflector 6 is now free forever by Matthieu DUFOURNEAUD-RAVEL

Redgate has backtracked, and Reflector 6 is now free forever.
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