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Newbie (sort of) question.

Sorry if this is ignorant. I've done some searching of the threads and maybe this is too general a question to get any hits, but here goes:

Why does it seem like some assemblies have NO implementation. You can see all the definitions, but in some cases, even for classes that are abstract, you don't see anything inside the curly braces.

A good example is almost everything inside the System.Activities (Workflow) namespace. I can see all the signatures and the get/set definitions for properties, but no actual implementation.

I've used older versions of Reflector and I always remembers seeing actual code. Does Microsoft have some special way of obfuscating certain assemblies now? It used to be obfuscated assemblies and weird tokens, but you could still sort of see the code.

Thanks to anyone who has the time to answer this basic question.

Adam
adamburns
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  • Clive Tong
    You are probably looking at one of the Reference Assemblies which just contain the metadata and not the IL.

    If I use File/Open Cache to go to a non-reference assembly, you should see the code.
    Clive Tong
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  • adamburns
    Thank you very much Clive,

    That was just what I was looking for.

    I never remember having to make that distinction in the past. I guess I'll have to read up on the difference between a reference assembly and any other assembly. Is this something new since 3.5?
    adamburns
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  • Clive Tong
    I think they'll been around since the 3.0 days. The following post discusses how they are used for multi-targetting: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/christy/archive ... blies.aspx
    Clive Tong
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