Question

When you open up Visual Studio and select View – Object Browser, you get a list of all objects in the .net framework: Assemblies – Namespaces – Classes – Methods and attributes.

I want create a database that contains this information. Does anyone know where I could get a copy of this data in a text or database format?

Answer 1

You can use reflection to loop through the types and members in each assembly and dump it to XML or a relational database.

To find the assemblies, loop through all of the DLL files in C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727 and C:\Program Files\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework and call Assembly.FromFile. Note that some of the DLLs are unmanaged, so you’ll need a catch block.

Each of the managed DLLs will have a corresponding XML file with the same name containing the IntelliSense documentation.