RedGate Reflector 7 news roundup
Below is a series of links related to todays news that RedGate will cease to offer a free version of its .NET Reflector product.
- The ZDNet article that broke the story
- The official RedGate announcement
- Youtube interview by the CEO of RedGate
- Redgate forum dedicated to this announcement
- JetBrains blog post alluding to a replacement they have been working on
- Jb Evain has announced he is working on a Mono.Cecil based decompiler on twitter
- For completeness, my earlier post on the matter
- Update (2011-02-05): Miguel de Icaza weighs in.
Stackoverflow Links
There are some stackoverflow questions that might be in need of updating as a result of the fallout of this.
In addition, hopefully there will be some activity on the Reflector section of alternativeto.net.
RedGate is no longer free? I say open source it!
As of today, RedGate’s .NET Reflector is no longer free. It is now $35. In an interview their CEO claimed they can not justify dedicating any developer resources to the product under the current free model.
I am a big fan of Redgate’s SQL Compare tool, it makes DB deploys as easy as code deploys. I’ve used .NET Reflector, although naturally its not the sort of thing I use on a regular basis. I had mixed reactions at first. I do think that $35 is a fair price for the tool. I am glad that they will continue to develop it, and I have no doubt that will happen if a revenue stream is realized from the product. That being said, perhaps it would be better to open source it.