Wednesday, August 20, 2008

.NET Reflector - What's next?

For those who use .NET Reflector you know how helpful the tool can be and if you don't you should. This tool written by Lutz Roeder has helped me personally on several occasions. One instance in particular when someone decided not to have their sourcecode in source control. As with any free tool, the primary question to ask is how long will it be maintained and useful? Lutz is a busy man, will he be able to commit enough time to Reflector to keep it viable?

Enter Red-Gate who announced just today that Lutz Roeder will be turning over responsibility for future development of .NET Reflector to them. Red-Gate is a very community minded company and will continue to offer the tool free to the community. They already produce some great products like ANTS Profiler and several SQL Server tools. But don't worry, Lutz is not completely out of the picture. He has already indicated that he expects to keep in touch with Red-Gate (see announcement).

No doubt, Red-Gate will plan to create features on top of the tool and have a pay version, they are a company and need to make money to live. Hopefully, they will stay true to the core of .NET Reflector though and keep all the existing functionality available in a free version for the long haul. I am curious to see what plans are in store for the next version of .NET Reflector. What do you think about it?