Hi Jason, in our company we used ILDasm and ILAsm for manipulating assemblies. We developed an OR-Mapping tool using this technique. We search for classes with a certain Attribute and enhance the classes so that they implement an additional interface. This interface is used by the framework for state management and getting the private data of the objects. (For those of you interested in this tool: it will be published at www.advanced-developers.de in January 2003.)
Unfortunately I can't give out the code, but it might be interesting for you, that it is easy to work that way. Parsing the IL is very easy. The IL code is hierarchical in it's nature so that you can build a tree much like a XML document. Use the composite pattern! We needed about 2 man days for having a first working version (which got some more functionality with the time). The best thing are the "line" statements of the IL, which maintains the ability to debug the original source code with the enhanced assembly - no pdb manipulation necessary. It's funny to see, how the private members of an object are filled "magically" with values if you step with the debugger in an enhanced procedure. If your assembly is signed, the enhanced assembly can be signed using the same key file. All necessary information for that is stored in the original assembly. We also examined the ILX toolkit which is very complicated to use. I don't recommend to use it if you only want to develop one certain tool. It might be worth to explore if you want to develop a lot of enhancing tools. If you choose to work with ILAsm and ILDasm, feel free to send me email and ask questions. Mirko
