Lutz Roeder scored major points with developers the world over when he released his .NET Reflector software, a tiny package of TNT that lets the user examine compiled .NET assemblies, and even disassemble them (for debugging purposes). I know it’s a tool I couldn’t live without. I’ve used it countless times to examine APIs of core .NET libraries, as well as third party, ill-documented assemblies. (What? No documentation? Perish the thought!) In 2008, Red Gate acquired the rights to enhance and publish reflector, and so their first polished incarnation has wandered into the wild. .NET Reflector 6 is still free, but an optional “pro” version may be purchased for a paltry $195.00. Reflector has been upgraded to support the new .NET 4.0 framework, and both versions come with Visual Studio integration. Reflector Pro includes the ability to decompile from within Visual Studio, and debug step-through capabilities as well. (You know, for those times when you’re certain that Microsoft has screwed something up in their base class libraries because your own code is pristine.) Add-ins for Reflector can be found on the Reflector Codeplex site in case the gun just isn’t big enough for you out-of-the-box.
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In my first year of development, I found bugs all over the place in Microsoft’s libraries. But as time went on and I got more development experience, there seemed to be fewer and fewer such bugs. All I can figure is that while I was gaining experience, Microsoft must’ve been getting much better at developing software.