As we’ve moved to using more shared assemblies in the REJIS Law Enforcement group we’ve run into some problems where someone gets an old copy of an assembly or we are trying to figure out what a shared assembly is referencing without having to open up the full solution and source code (or rolling back to an old version of source).  This is going to happen, so don’t let it scare you away from sharing code.  Shared code is good code, but with that comes certain things that will undoubtedly happen; having tools and procedures in place to handle these things make life much easier. Trust me.

ILDASM.exe is one handy tool provided by Microsoft for letting you peer inside the assembly, and most importantly, you can see the manifest file which is where the dependencies can be found.

To open ILDASM, head to a Visual Studio Command Prompt and type in ‘ILDASM’ (no quotes).  Once in, just open your assembly and double-click the manifest to view the dependencies.

ILDASM-01

You can also do the same thing in Reflector, which is another great (free) tool for troubleshooting .NET assemblies and peering into bits you may not have control over.

Just open up Reflector and load the assembly you want to look at and check out the Visual Studio style "references" tree menu to see what dependencies there are.