How to locate Anonymous Types in source code files using Visual Studio

During the process of obfuscating a .NET assembly (using Dotfuscator), I have found my开发者_如何学Goself tweaking how things are renamed. This often involves looking at the assembly in ILDASM and tracing a Type back to the source code file that it is defined in.

Usually this is a simple process. But I have found that locating an Anonymous Type is very difficult -- especially in a large assembly.

If I am trying to find the location of an anonymous type, such as the following line of code:

new { Name = 'Gene', Age = 30 }

Which is compiled as:

<>f__AnonymousType0`2'<'<Name>j__TPar','<Age>j__TPar'>`

And appears as the root of the assembly in the ILDASM tree.

If I want to locate the anonymous type in the source code, I am left without much help:

• No Namespace
• No symbols to search on
• Nothing in the Solution Navigator
• Nothing in the Class View
• Nothing in the Object Browser

Am I missing something? Are there any tools to help locate an Anonymous Type in code files?

Obviously the code for the anonymous class itself isn't present in the original source code, but there's source code which leads to the creation of the anonymous class, and I assume that's what you're trying to find. However, There may be multiple source files involved.

For example, in your example, there could be:

Class1.cs:
    var x = new { Name = "Jon", Age = 10 };

Class2.cs:
    var y = new { Name = 100, Age = 10m };

// And potentially many other source files

Both of those would use the same generic type, but with different type arguments. Basically you'd need to find every anonymous-object-creation-expression expression using the same property names in the same order. I wouldn't be surprised if the metadata contained nothing to help you here directly.

EDIT: The generated code will contain a reference to the constructor of the anonymous type, of course - so you could look for that. It's not clear what tools you're using, but searching for the name of the anonymous type within the IL would fine the uses.