Assembly Information

Assembly Information is an advanced and easy-to-use tool that retrieves assembly details of applications developed in .NET Framework. It works only for DLL files and supplies you with the .NET assembly full name and references (recursively).

The setup operation is fast and the only notable aspect about it is that it requires .NET Framework 4.0. Once installed, it gets integrated into the Windows Explorer shell extension, which means that you can quickly obtain information about DLL assemblies by just opening their right-click menu. Alternatively, they can be opened by making file associations with Assembly Information, or by dropping the DLLs on the program's executable file.

The main app window has a simple structure and reveals details about the compilation type (release, optimized, PDB sequencing, edit and continue disabled), assembly kind (e.g. contains only the Microsoft Intermediate Language MSIL), target processor (e.g. AnyCPU) and full name, along with direct and indirect references.

There are no other notable options implemented into this tool. Unfortunately, it doesn't have buttons for printing information or exporting it to file for closer investigation. However, selected text can be copied to the Clipboard.

It runs on a low amount of CPU and RAM, so it doesn't hamper system performance. Thanks to the context menu integration, the utility can be easily called for a selected DLL when navigating directories in your default file explorer.

On the other hand, it failed to retrieve details for various DLLs in our tests, although they were valid .NET assemblies. It seems that it doesn't offer support for all .NET Framework versions. We are also keeping in mind that it hasn't been updated for a while.

Bottom line is that Assembly Information provides useful technical details about .NET assemblies but it doesn't work for all .NET Framework versions.