Which program in Visual Studio lets me look into DLLs to see its API?
.NetVisual Studio-2008.Net Problem Overview
See the question. I want to see the methods and classes offered by a DLLs library.
.Net Solutions
Solution 1 - .Net
This is exactly what the Object Browser is for.
- Add a reference to the DLL.
- Right click it in the list.
- Click View in Object Browser.
Solution 2 - .Net
For those coming from the old Visual Studio 6.0 days:
Dependency Walker is a nice free tool, that was formerly part of Visual Studio.
http://www.dependencywalker.com/
I like it still. Here is a screen shot:
Solution 3 - .Net
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ILSpy is an open-source tool which allows you to browse an assembly's packages and classes and also to decompile code.
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Another free-of-charge tool is JetBrain's dotPeek.
Solution 4 - .Net
There's also the DLL export viewer if you don't have VS installed on a machine.
Solution 5 - .Net
If the DLL is a .NET assembly you might want to take a look at Reflector for a more detailed view.
Solution 6 - .Net
If you have limited options to download: In Visual Studio you could use Visual Studio Developer Command Prompt.
Open it from windows menu -> All programs -> Visual Studio XX -> Visual Studio Tools -> Developer Command Prompt.
Then: run command: ildasm
Example ildasm:
ildasm c:\MyNetAssembly.dll
If you have access to download any program you could use better options:
IlSpy
dotPeek
.net reflector
JustDecompile
Solution 7 - .Net
There's a dependency tracker tool that comes with the Windows SDK (formerly the Platform SDK), it's got a reasonable GUI for looking inside executables and DLL's.
There are also some command line tools that you can use to see inside of dll's, dumpbin in particular - check the MSDN help in visual studio for more information. You can run these tools from the command prompt in the Visual Studio start menu folder.
Solution 8 - .Net
Outside of Visual Studio, you can use a dependency tool which is able to inspect DLL and EXE imports and exports, it integrates with the shell and is very easy to use. It comes with some Microsoft SDKs. If you want to avoid the hassle of downloading and installing SDK just because of this, easy download links for all 32b/64b platforms are available at http://www.dependencywalker.com/
Microsoft documentation (no download) is available at MicroSoft Technet
Similar functionality is also available in SysInternals Process Explorer - best suited when inspecting running processes.