Tip: Use ILDASM for more than viewing IL

Here’s a tip I came across on GDN. Basically, you can use ILDASM` to extract all of the resources from an assembly (in addition to the IL code). A specific example would be to extract all of the icons from the VS.NET IDE. To do this, just follow these simple steps.

• Go into your VS.NET installation directory, usually C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET\Common7\IDE, right click a DLL such as Microsoft.VSDesigner.dll, and select open with.
• Select to open the file with ILDASM.EXE, which is usually found in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET\FrameworkSDK\Bin, you'll have to hit the “Other..”` button and browse to it.
• Once you open the DLL with ILDASM, click File -> Dump. Select all the check boxes in the following modal screen, and select OK. It will ask you to enter a name and location to save the IL file, create a new folder for the contents to be dumped to because there will be a lot of files.
• After you dump the file, look at the contents of your folder…it will have all the images that were embedded as resources in the DLL.