AssemblyPlaceholder / ILDummy

[dbent]

@hvacengi Hit a snag with generics working on the improved ILDummy so I just threw up the old code in AssemblyPlaceholder. It's not perfect but it gets the job done; it takes a single command line parameter which is the path to a direct containing assemblies, it then spits out dummies of them into a subdirectory Dummies. I'll continue to work on the improved ILDummy.

[hvacengi]

Thanks for sharing! I'll download that copy and poke around to get familiar. I'll try to do what I can to help you improve it as you go!

[djungelorm]

I just came across this after writing my own tool that does the same thing - although it uses the opposite approach of loading the assembly then stripping out non-public types/methods/etc.

It's here if you're interested: https://github.com/djungelorm/stubber

[dbent]

Cool @djungelorm. My rationale for using the additive method was that if there was a bug in the implementation at worst you get a non-functioning assembly, whereas with the subtractive method a bug in the implementation could lead to proprietary code being inadvertently distributed.

For reference, there's a Microsoft tool to do just this (sort of) as part of .NET Core. In .NET parlance assemblies without implementation are "Reference Assemblies". A prerelease version of the tool is on NuGet (although it doesn't seem to have been updated in a while). The repository is here. It looks like the tool reads an assembly and then spits out a C# source file with just the public members. Presumably you can then compile the source into an actual assembly, but I haven't really tried messing around with it. My method, as janky as it is, continues to work.