You have just built an assembly in Visual Studio and want to look at it using a tool like Lutz Roeder's Reflector. So what do you do? You start reflector, go to the  File->Open menu option and navigate to the directory containing the assembly. Sound familiar? Wouldn't it be great if it was possible to start reflector from within the IDE and automatically load the assembly? Well you can using the External Tools feature from within Visual Studio.

Here are the steps:

1. Navigate to the Tools menu and select External Tools. The External Tools dialog will appear.

2. Enter a title (the character after ampersand will become the ALT key), command (location of reflector executable) and arguments ($(ItemPath) is the file currently selected in the solution explorer). In the above, I setup the title to be &Reflector which means the hot key will be Alt R.

That's it you are done. Now whenever you want to reflect, select the assembly in the solution explorer, select Tools menu item, and then select the newly created menu item for reflector. Alternatively you can use the hotkey Alt T + Alt R (assuming you setup the hot key as per step 2).

Happy Reflecting!

Guess the Movie

There are two kinds of spurs, my friend. Those that come in by the door,  those that come in by the window.