Reflector V8 has just shipped, so here’s a quick overview. In this update we’ve added better search and filtering (in Reflector Desktop, and the Visual Studio extension), improved navigation to decompiled code from the call stack, fixed plenty of bugs, improved performance a little, and added decompilation in Visual Studio when you hit an exception. The big idea was to make it easier and faster to get to the relevant lines of code when you’re debugging. Search and filtering
This is the most visible change in version 8. The object browser in Reflector Desktop, and in the Visual Studio extension now has a search box at the top. This lets you filter the tree view so you can just look at the things you might be interested in.
The search includes some scoping, so you can search for, say, all instances of a search string within a particular namespace. This should make it a bit quicker to find what you’re looking for, and navigate through unfamiliar code. Debugging in Visual Studio
If you’re debugging an executable or library without source code, and that’s where the error is, the call stack can be a bit unhelpful. It’ll either be empty or greyed-out, depending on your settings. What we’ve done in V8, is add the ability to navigate to decompiled source from grey frames. So when you break in a debugging session, you should now always be able to get direct to source.
It works under IIS, too, so debugging should get a little nicer for the web and SharePoint folks. Try it out
Version 8 is available now, and you can download it and try it out.
This release wraps up what’s been a fairly sizeable version 7. It’s nothing like an exhaustive list, but we’ve seen: a new installer, plenty of engine work (C#5, VB improvements, XAML, etc) various batches of work on the power commands, PDB generation and debugging in Visual Studio, VS2012 support, this new search and debugging functionality, and a substantial set of bug fixes. You can check out a full list of what’s new since version 7 on the changelog.
If you’ve already bought version 7, we’ll be making version 8 available as a free upgrade, so your existing license should just work. If you haven’t tried v7 yet, it’s well worth taking a look at version 8, because quite a lot has changed in the last couple of years.