Work with assemblies directly

In last several months I have been working with C++/C# creating custom CLR hosts to work with them from unmanaged code and often direct access to the assembly manifest is required. For that time, Reflector API was the right library for this.

However, what if you want to analyze assembly without loading it into application domain? System.Reflector.Emit fails – it works with loaded assemblies.

For this reason there is a good library that came from Mono – "Cecil" (Thanks to MVP Greg Young for this note).

Cecil allows you to extract CIL bytecodes and work with assemblies without loading them.