DILE and .NET 4.0

Good news. I've started to work on modifying DILE to support .NET 4.0. The latest weekly build that I uploaded is running on .NET 4 and it does support debugging .NET 4 applications. However, it doesn't really use any .NET 4 specific feature yet and so far I've tested it for maybe half an hour so be very cautious with it. :-)

By the way, upgrading to .NET 4 was not so trivial. Apparently the MSDN documentation is not really clear about how it should be done. But fortunately Rick Byers helped me after I posted my question in an MSDN forum. So, I owe him a special thanks and hopefully his answer will help others as well.

P.S.: I think I will try to add support for debugging dump files as well in the future. :-)

But where is the 'E'?

Recently DILE received 2 negative ratings/reviews on SourceForge because it is not a real IL editor. And this is not the first case when DILE is accused of not having this feature.

Perhaps it's time to make it clear: DILE is not an IL editor. It does not allow you to modify the IL (binary) code of an assembly. Yet...

The description of DILE on SourceForge says:

Dotnet IL Editor (DILE) is an editor program which helps modifying .NET assemblies. It is intended to be able to disassemble .NET assemblies, modify the IL code, recompile it and run inside a debugger.

This is the description that I sent to SourceForge admins almost 6 years ago to get the project approved. I haven't changed it since then and seems like this was a mistake. Although I thought the expression "intended to be", the project status of "planning" and the version number which is nowhere near 1.0 shows that DILE is not really ready yet.

But anyway, I have changed the description to this:

Dotnet IL Editor (DILE) allows disassembling and debugging .NET 1.0/1.1/2.0/3.0/3.5 applications without source code or .pdb files. It can debug even itself or the assemblies of the .NET Framework on IL level.

I hope this helps to avoid such confusions in the future.

(Almost) Weekly builds

Usually after working on DILE, I make a release build which I upload to SkyDrive for myself. The next day I download it in my office and use it. "Eat your own dogfood.". And I was thinking that others might also be interested in getting such latest builds of DILE. Fortunately my suspicion was confirmed by an e-mail that I received not so long ago. Thus I decided to make weekly builds of DILE publicly available.

First of all a warning: what I upload and make available is _never_ a stable, tested version of DILE. It might crash and cause other problems. I don't promise that it works properly. It is a version that is still under development, features might not be completely implemented and there might be bugs that officially released versions should not have. I strongly recommend using v0.2.6 that is available on SourceForge for doing serious job like debugging on a production server.

But if you're still interested in using the latest version of DILE despite the warning then you can find the build on SourceForge. I will regularly update this file based on the latest modifications in the source code.

I really hope that sharing the latest build of DILE will help me with getting more feedback. Therefore if you have any opinion about the changes that you see in DILE or you find any bug that I introduced since the last official release then please let me know.

Edit: I modified the link to the weekly builds. I will always put the latest weekly build in the DILE/WeeklyBuild folder together with a couple of previous versions.