Whats the relation(if any) of MASM assembly language and ILASM?

whats the relation(if any) of MASM assembly language and ILASM. Is there a one to one conversion? Im trying to incorporate Quantum GIS into a program Im kinda writing as I go along! I have GIS on my computer, I have RedGate Reflector and it nor the Object Browser of Visual Studio 2008 couldnt open one(of several which I dont have a strong clue to how they behave) of the .dlls in Quantum. I used the MASM assembly editor and "opened" the same dll and it spewed something I didnt expect to necessarily understand in the first place. How can I/can I make a conversion of that same "code" to something I can interact with in ILASM and Im assuming consequently in Csharp? Thanks a ton for reading and 开发者_开发问答all the responses to earlier questions...please bear in mind Im relatively new to programming in Csharp, and even fresher to MASM and ILASM.

MASM deals with the x86 instructions and is platform/processor dependent, while ILASM reffers to the .Net CIL (common intermediary language) instructions which are platform/processor independent. Switching from something specific to something more general is hard to achieve, that's why, AFAIK, there is no converter from MASM to ILASM (inverse, there is!)

IL is a platform independent layer of abstraction over native code. Code written on the .NET platform in C#, VB.NET, or other .NET language all compile down to an assembly .EXE/.DLL containing IL. Typically, the first time the IL code is executed the .NET runtime will run it through NGen, which compiles it once again down to native code and stores the output in a temporary location where it is actually executed. This allows .NET platform code to be deployed to any platform supporting that .NET framework, regardless of the processor or architecture of the system.

As you've seen, Reflector is great for viewing the code in an assembly because IL can easily be previewed in C# or VB.NET form. This is because IL is generally a little higher level instructions and also contain a lot of metadata that native code wouldn't normally have, such as class, method, and variable names.

It's also possible to compile a .NET project directly to native code by setting the Visual Studio project platform or by calling Ngen.exe directly on the assembly. Once done, it's really difficult to make sense of the native code.

Ther is no relationship between MASM assembly language and ILASM. I don't see you have any way to convert native code to IL code. IL can be understood by CLR only while the MASM assembly language is about native machine code. CLR turns the IL into native code in runtime