Exploring and Decompiling Assemblies

Assembly Explorer Window allows opening multiple assemblies and keeping a list of opened assemblies and folders. You can traverse and explore all opened assemblies. Expanding an assembly node lists namespaces within the assembly, that can be further expanded to types and type members, as well as assembly references. You can double-click any type to decompile it or fetch source from a symbol server (depending on your settings).
In addition, the Assembly Explorer contains nodes representing base types and inheritors of the current type.

The ultimate step in exploring an assembly is exporting it to a Visual Studio project so that you can browse the source code, build and debug it. For more information, see Exporting Assembly to Project.

You can easily search symbols in all assemblies loaded in the Assembly Explorer - just use Go to Everything/Type (Ctrl+N) or Go to Symbol (Ctrl+Shift+Alt+N) commands.

In this section:

• Opening and Closing Assemblies
• Finding Assemblies in Folders
• Opening Assemblies from NuGet Packages
• Exploring Assemblies from Current Processes
• Opening Assemblies from Global Assembly Cache
• Managing Assembly Lists
• Exploring Hierarchy of References
• Exploring Assembly Dependency Diagram
• Exporting Assembly to Project
• Generating PDB Files