Post

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.
This post is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by the author.