Telerik Promises a Free .NET Decompiler Forever

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.