Assembly Changes With Reflexil Have No Effect

Question

i'm trying to change a DLL of a Net 4.0 Application with Reflexil. The directory looks like this:

Main.exe
SomeOther.exe
Lib1.dll
Lib2.dll
Lib3.dll 
...

Now I'm trying to change some IL code in any of these files with Reflector 7.5.3.8 Trail and Reflexil 1.5. For example, I remove all the code from the Main() method in Main.exe (THE main method, I'm sure about this) leaving nothing but a ret. After saving the changes, I still don't see any effect, the program starts as usual.

I guess the problem is, that there is still a cached version of that file somewhere. How do I solve that problem?

What do I have to do to change IL code of the DLLs?

Answer 1

After many hours of work, I finally found the problem.

At installation, the program generated NativeImages - nothing unusual so far. The Problem was, that

ngen uninstall Lib1.dll

or

ngen uninstall Main.exe

did not uninstall the Native Image. Why? I had no idea... I tried

ngen display Lib1.dll

and it said, there's no such assembly. By coincidence, I tried to list the whole Native Image Cache with a find:

ngen display | find "Lib1"

which showed me, that it is still in there (why that?!). This time I tried to uninstall it not by uninstall Lib1.dll, but by executing

ngen uninstall Lib1  (without dll)

which worked like a charm and told me the problem. It didn't uninstall it, because other assemblies in the Native Image Cache still depended on it. I had to uninstall all the dependent assemblies first, after that it was deleted automatically.

I hope this is of some help. I think it's really confusing to distinguish between the file and the assembly in general...