Wednesday, July 06, 2005
"Inside Microsoft .NET IL Assembler"
If you want to learn more about MSIL, because you want to read some dumps in ILDASM, tweak some code at the IL level, or dynamically generate code through Reflection.Emit, this book is a nice and easy read.
Unlike traditional assembly books, you won't find much information about performance. This is partially unavoidable, since IL is just... intermediate :-), and the actual performance depends on the final machine code. Still, some examples of translation into Intel assembly would have been useful, e.g. when the switch/case is introduced.
Overall, the book provides you valuable information on IL, like the ability to do a tail function call, but leaves you wanting more. On the other hand, some details I need are not strictly part of MSIL, but more on the side of the CLR. Those details are somewhat covered in two classics on CLR (from Richter and Box), which unfortunately are a little boring to read :-).
