Explore and decompile assemblies

Assembly Explorer allows opening multiple assemblies and keeping a list of open assemblies and folders. You can traverse and explore all open assemblies. Expanding an assembly node lists namespaces within the assembly, which can be further expanded to types and type members, as well as assembly references, resources, and metadata. You can double-click any type to decompile it or fetch source from a symbol server (depending on your settings).

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, refer to Export assembly to project.

You can easily search symbols in all assemblies loaded in the Assembly Explorer — just use Search Everywhere/Go to Type Control+N or Go to Symbol Shift+Control+Alt+N commands.

In this section:

• Assembly Explorer window
• Process Explorer window
• Open and close assemblies
• Find assemblies in folders
• Open assemblies from NuGet packages
• Explore assemblies from current processes
• Open assemblies from Global Assembly Cache
• Manage assembly lists
• Explore assembly and portable PDB Metadata
• Explore PDB contents
• Explore hierarchy of references
• Explore assembly dependency diagram
• Compare assemblies
• Export assembly to project
• Generate PDB files