Hacker Remix

dnSpyEx: .NET debugger and assembly editor

204 points by unleaded 3 days ago | 27 comments

poincaredisk 3 days ago

DnSpy was great. The author (d4d) did many great things for the world of .net reversing and binary analysis, including dnspy and dnlib. One day, i don't know why, they archived most of their repositories.

I'm glad electrokill stepped up and maintains dnspyex now. This also shows how resilient open source can be - as long as someone wants to work on the project, it can go on forever.

poizan42 2 days ago

They are still actively working on dnlib: https://github.com/0xd4d/dnlib

bossyTeacher 3 days ago

>One day, i don't know why, they archived most of their repositories.

Sounds like whytheluckystiff.

stickybeek 2 days ago

I think the simple answer here is that we grew up. Most of us in the scene at that time and creating these types of tools were between 16-20 years old.

sameer_hacker 2 days ago

That's right. There was a time when reverse engineering was a big scene and creating these kind of tools was a craze. But eventually it faded away as people started using more web based tools

skirge 2 days ago

tools are private or security companies were created based on this work. Only few are published (to create market for defense tools or penetration testing you need to show that hacking is very easy - no one needs lockers if there are no thiefs).

cobertos 3 days ago

Love this tool, used it mod a Unity game and learn all the internals to see how to integrate my mod with the base game. Was an invaluable resource. It also taught me a lot about how they made that game (Lethal Company) and how it was truly made to ship/get the idea out the door and not for perfection/maintainable code.

~~IIRC the maintainer was like 15 years old?~~ Edit: My mistake, the maintainer is 18, https://github.com/ElektroKill

buybackoff 3 days ago

Used dnSpy once to debug runtime IL-emited code as if it was C#. It managed to step into a generated emitted method, decompile it on the fly and set breakpoints on the decompiled C# code for subsequent hits. That was a mind-blowing at the time, nothing else was close and I'm not sure any other tool or IDE supports this even now. Though didn't have a need for that since.

pjmlp 2 days ago

Java IDEs have done this for quite a while, and recent versions of VS and Rider as well.

However even before .NET came to be, you could have had such experience in Smalltalk and Common Lisp environments.

infogulch 3 days ago

Used this to debug an application crash in a vendor's proprietary windows app recently, and I was able to file a detailed bug report. (Though they decided it's notabug, womp womp.)

You can install it with winget, but it's very particular about whether you're debugging a win32 or win64 app and it's a bit of a pain to get it to install both or just win32. I wonder if it would be possible to have both bundled in the same installer and just automatically relaunch the app if you try to debug a program with a mismatching arch. Or just download from the releases page...