May, 2010
Reflector has gone south.
Lutz Roeder recently passed ownership of this free Utility to Red Gate Software and the new Reflector under Red Gate’s direction sucks big time. The first annoyance is that the auto update feature forces you to go get Red Gate’s version. You run reflector and it says:
This version of .NET Reflector is out of date. Do you want to update automatically?
It used to be if you said ‘No’ you’d just get to run the version you already have. Now the program just quits. No Reflector for you! If you say ‘Yes’ you are alerted that Reflector cannot be automatically updated and that you need to go to the Red Gate site to download the new version. Brilliant, now I’ve completely lost the context of what i was using Reflector for in the first place, the auto update appears to be purposely broken, and I need to do a manual install of the new version to even be able to use Reflector again. And because I’m running reflector via TDD.NET’s VS plugin I have to go searching my hard drive for where the actually reflector exe is located:
C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Mutant Design\TestDriven.NET 2.0\Reflector
And that’s not the end of it. Once you do get the new version installed you get dragged into a trial of the ‘Pro’ version which has VS integration and all sorts of fancy features. The problem with this we realized a few days later and after a lot of hair pulling is that it massively slows down .NET CF builds. Once you open a visual designer in a .NET CF project the new ‘Pro Reflector’ is doing something crazy in the background that takes a long time (30-40 seconds) causing your build times to sky rocket and the hallway sword fights to commence. Thanks to my friend AB for figuring all that out after disabling each of his VS plugins one by one to sort out the issue.
I used to recommend this tool to everyone, but with Red Gate at the wheel, I’m not so sure anymore. Anyone know of some alternatives? I miss Lutz’s version.
Seems like I’m not the only one with this gripe:
http://wiert.wordpress.com/2010/04/06/net-reflector-catch-22/ http://apps.red-gate.com/messageboard/viewtopic.php?p=27756&sid=daab8e6756fbb5ce571073443d41a71c
