dnSpyEx: .NET debugger and assembly editor
11 comments
·January 15, 2025poincaredisk
bossyTeacher
>One day, i don't know why, they archived most of their repositories.
Sounds like whytheluckystiff.
cobertos
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
infogulch
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...
mrcsharp
This is great news! Every time I used dnSpy I was blown away by how well made it was.
I still don't know why the original dnSpy repo was archived suddenly. Every once in a while I would go check to see if there's been any movement. I didn't realize this project existed so thanks for sharing.
buybackoff
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.
TechSquidTV
Ahh I remember this. I used this to successfully bypass the registration of a small web scraper back in the day.
munchler
Congrats on stealing someone’s software so you could steal someone else’s data!
croes
Mandatory registration doesn’t necessarily means costs.
I once had a 3D model viewer that needed a free online activation but the machine didn’t had internet access, so I flipped the assembly instruction from if registered start to if not registered start.
TechSquidTV
I laughed out loud lol. We have LLMs for this now.
null
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.