JetBrains rubs salt in RedGate community's wound, announces free decompiler coming soon

Earlier this month, RedGate annoyed a large chunk of their user community by announcing that the new version of their Reflector software would not come with a free edition as had previously been available. Reflector is essentially a decompiler for .NET assemblies, allowing developers to see inside methods to see how they work when they normally wouldn’t be able to.

Now JetBrains, a competing company with its ReSharper set of tools for Visual Studio, has poured salt in RedGate’s wound by announcing that not only would the next version of ReSharper come bundled with a decompiler, but the decompiler would be available for free as a separate install as well.

“It’s free as in ‘we have other ways to earn money, so if the community is used to having a decompiler for free, why not give it to them for free?’” writes JetBrains’ Jura Gorohovsky in their blog comments.

In conjunction with this release, JetBrains is calling on package managers such as NuGet and OpenWrap to include information on where source code is available for open-source packages, so that it may be made available more easily to developers wishing to delve into it.

If you want to try out the decompiler from JetBrains now, it is available in the nightly ReSharper 6 builds.

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