.net assembly compare

[pdmsjohn]

Hello,

It would be extremely useful to be able to compare .net assemblies using reflection. There is at least one tool that can do it (BitDiffer) but it's not a patch on BC.

Is such a thing ever likely? If not, would it be possible for me to develop an addin that utilizes .net code? If there is, is there a good resource I can use to get started?

Thanks very much,

John

[Chris]

Hi John,

You might be able to setup a custom external conversion file format to do this.

First, you will need to find a command line tool or write a tool that can dump the assembly information to a text file. The hypothetical tool would be called "dotnet2text.exe" and it would take an input file and output file name as command line arguments.

Once you have the utility, create a new file format to use it for specified file types. Select Tools > File Formats from the menu. Click New, then select "Text Format" as the format type. Name the format and specify file extensions that match your .net assemblies.

Go to the Conversion tab for the new format and set Conversion to "External Program". Under loading, enter a path to your conversion program, followed by the variables %s and %t for the source filename and the target filename. An example would be "c:\dotnet2text.exe %s %t".

Once you have this configured, it will make Beyond Compare call the conversion program when you open files with matching file extensions in the Text Compare. The Text Compare will open the exported text represented by the %t variable and compare it.

These steps should work for any binary file format that can be converted to text by a command line program.