Question

I’m playing around with the MS IL disassembler, which lets you view the contents of a .Net assembly. The classes and Interfaces are shown in a tree view, nicely encoded with colors and icons.

It’s rather easy to guess the meaning of most icons, e.g. a blue icon with a capital ‘I’ inscribed is an interface, a grey one with an ‘E’ in it is an enumeration, but some items — esp. the ones you get to see when you open an node — are not always that easy to guess (maybe it’s just me). What is the meaning of a light blue diamond with an ‘S’ in it? Probably a static public member, but I’m unhappy with the word ‘probably’ here. Similarly, blue class symbols with a white rectangle seem to be generics, but this, again, is only a guess.

Is there an official complete list with explanations/descriptions available somewhere?

Answer 1

Clicking “Help” under “Help” and “Tree View Icons” shows what the icons mean, however it appears to be missing a few. Below is an exhaustive list.

• – Metadata, such as the assembly manifest, type declaration modifiers, etc.
• – A Namespace.
• – An instance field, assembly, or netmodule.
• – A static field.
• – A class, delegate, or module (VB.NET).
• – A class or delegate with type arguments (generics).
• – A struct.
• – A struct with type arguments (generics).
• – An interface.
• – An interface with type arguments (generics).
• – An enumeration.
• – An instance method or constructor.
• – An instance method with type arguments (generics).
• – A static method or type initializer (static constructor).
• – A static method with type arguments (generics).
• – A property, instance or static.
• – An event, instance or static.