Let’s face it, if you don’t know .NET Reflector, you can never claim to be a .NET developer.
Today Red Gate announced the acquisition of Lutz Roeder’s .NET Reflector.
On .NET Reflector’s page, Red Gate states that “will continue to maintain a free version for the benefit of the community”.
You can read an interview with Lutz Roeder and James Moore (general manager of .NET Developer Tools at Red Gate) at simple-talk.
James doesn’t know yet how to improve Reflector, but I do. Reflector needs a major improvement on UI usability and performance. Let’s see if I can come up with a list:
- For me, search as you type is not a good idea as it is in Reflector.
- Still in the search theme, search as you type would be nice for the active code window.
- I cannot understand why changing any of the options fires a total repaint and lost of the view of the active code item.
- Settings like code, documentation and number formatting should possible to change on the fly with a simple toolbar click.
I’m sure Red Gate is more than capable of taking good care of .NET Reflector.