

ILSpy is the open-source .NET assembly browser and decompiler. - danielionescu
http://wiki.sharpdevelop.net/ilspy.ashx

======
jeroen
august 2008:

"Our commitment is to maintain an amazing free tool ..."

<http://www.red-gate.com/our-company/about/news/net-reflector>

february 2011:

"Red Gate has announced that it will charge $35 for version 7 of .NET
Reflector upon its release in early March"

[http://www.red-gate.com/products/dotnet-
development/reflecto...](http://www.red-gate.com/products/dotnet-
development/reflector/announcement)

~~~
InclinedPlane
From the second link:

 _"As many of you know, our original intention was to maintain .NET Reflector
as a free tool. But, after two-and-a-half years of providing it without
charge, we realized that we could not make the free model work. We know that
this will cause pain for some people in the .NET community, and we apologize
for the change in policy.

As a commercial company, we need to charge at least a nominal amount to keep
.NET Reflector up-to-date and relevant. Without revenue coming in, we cannot
dedicate a team of developers to ensure that Reflector remains a valuable part
of .NET developers’ toolboxes."_

They gave it a shot, for 2.5 years, and it didn't work. It's hard to fault
them. Consider how ridiculously low $35 is for any tool of this sort, I don't
think this is some money grubbing effort on Red-Gate's part.

~~~
Shanewho
The money grubbing part is that the existing free version will expire and you
will no longer be able to use it. So even if you are willing to use the
existing product (which doesn't require a "dedicated team of developers"), you
are out of luck.

~~~
mahmud
If they allowed this old version to float-around, it might tarnish the brand.

Also, what stops people from saying "it's money grubbing to have a crippled
freebie like this and _demand_ $35 for full version".

$35 is nothing. I wrote decompilers and they're pretty damn hard and require
constant upkeep and testing.

~~~
Shanewho
There is a difference in "They still offer a crippled freebie for download on
there site" and "They disable the version that I have on my computer that
works just fine, and force me to pay money for features I may not be
interested in". If they don't want to offer a free/old/crippled version
anymore, I don't blame them. But if I already have the software installed on
my pc today, and tomorrow it doesn't work, that's really lame.

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rbanffy
It seems the number of startups using .NET is increasing, or, at least, the
interest on it by the HN community is growing.

I'm curious, so:

AskHN: Are you using .NET on your startup and why did you chose it?

~~~
JonoW
I'm not in a startup or anything, but consider this; cloud computing is
gaining momentum fast, and lots of startups will use cloud platforms like EC2,
AppEngine, Azure etc.

The one thing about this change is that traditional licensing concerns go
away. If you use Azure, you are paying by usage, so Windows licenses aren't in
play. I guess my point is that the fear of launching a startup and having to
face spirling license costs (for using MS products) is going to decline as
more people adopt cloud platforms.

~~~
jacabado
Plus: If you go Azure where will you develop? Will some nice M$ guy install
Visual Studio in the cloud and you will use remote desktop? Where will you
test? No local dev servers, really?

Besides that, Azure is NOT usage payed, Azure is an approximation to that I
would call scalable server rental. You pay by time and size, not by use. Maybe
that explains Azure's momentum, they're getting things right and discouraging
people by having expensive/inadequate prices. I hope they get it right soon,
and that they start billing by usage.

I do .Net at an agency and I like it but it's amazing how much noise there is
in the Microsoft ecossystem.

~~~
JonoW
I would imagine the license costs for dev tools for a startup are neglible. If
you run Azure you would setup test/staging instances and tear them down when
not in use, again because of scale, I would imagine that cost is negligible.

As for usage costs, doesn't Azure use the same model as all the others, e.g.
EC2, in that cost = compute hours (i.e. instance running) + data transfer +
storage? So if by usage you mean ultra accurate per CPU millisecond billing,
then I don't anyone does that? Would be great though. Happy to be proved wrong
though, I'm no expert on this...

~~~
jacabado
I agree that the dev tools license costs for a startup are/should be
negligible, I was just pointing that Azure isn't a substitute for a dev
environment (and it's licensing costs).

I also think that the problem of the production environment costs is a good
one to have, nobody should fear to start a business because of them. If you
can't solve that problem it means you have the wrong business model or really
bad engineers.

Oops my bad, I tought others did the billing by CPU load instead of by hour.

------
mariusmg
And it's done by the #develop team. Great work guys.

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mkr-hn
I checked back at my comment on the announcement
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2170957>) and was amazed to see it was
only two weeks ago.

Either they work fast or were already working on this.

~~~
batterseapower
I know one of the authors, David Srbecky: he was in my class at Cambridge. His
final year undergrad project was a decompiler from IL to C#, so he had a big
chunk of code for this lying around already - the Reflector changes provided
the motivation to finally clean it up and publish it.

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easilydeasily
interesting points made about this tool and in regard to licensing and cloud
computing. I agree this tool is useful in checking /testing licensing schemes,
and as i am in the process of completing the development of a dual key
encryption system for windows apps (web apps later maybe), i will find this
tool very useful, however, the software business in my opinion is ultimately
about the total cost of delivering the app/data to the end user. Cloud
computing probably is the main platform for future apps as the platforms for
delivery are so diverse, windows, mac, linux mobile ... but keep in mind,
total cost of cloud computing could rise, and there are some apps which have
to be run locally for any number of reasons ...

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pavel
Whoa! That was fast. A good working application in a few weeks.

