Finding references to assemblies

The current task at my job requires me to patch (a fancy name for change) .NET assemblies, sometimes adding new members, sometimes changing type references, sometimes messing with the method implementation and sometimes doing a bit of all.

From time to time I need to find out why a assembly (A) has a reference to some other assembly (B); basically what I need to know is which type/member(s) from assembly B is being used by assembly A.

One particularly easy way (IMO) is to simply ildasm assembly A and look for references to B; in order to accomplish that you can do something like:

c:\temp> ildasm /all /out=c:\temp\assembly-a.il assembly-a.dll

After you generated the CIL from your assembly your next step is to search for the name of the assembly you want to find references for (in this example, Assembly_B); you'll find one or more (actually one for each referenced assembly) sessions in the IL code like:

.assembly extern /*23000005*/ Assembly_B
{

}

Now, you can either search for the name Assembly_B or by the number to its left (in this case 23000005)

.assembly extern /*23000005*/ Assembly_B
{
  .ver 1:0:0:0
}
.
.
.

IL_0006:  /* 28   | (0A)0000B2       */ call instance void [Assembly_B/*23000005*/]NamespaceName.TypeName::DoSomething()
.
.
.

In this example assembly A is using the instance method DoSomething() from type TypeName in namespace NamespaceName from assembly B.

What do you think?

Happy coding.

(Leia este post em português)