Costura Plugin for ILSpy

Costura is an add-in for Fody which allows to embedd references in binaries as resources. This means that e.g. all the DLL files that are required by a binary are added as compressed resources in the new binary. They are loaded with some compiled-in trampolin code by Costura. This plugin adds decompression and loading support for such embedded references to ILSpy to make decompilation of binaries compiled with Costura easier.

Installation

A pre-built DLL is available in the release section. Just copy it to the same directory where the ILSpy.exe resides and run ILSpy.exe.

Usage

This plugin will add two context menu items:

• Load Embedded References: Embeded references will be decompressed and the original DLL files will be stored in the same path as the assembly they have been extracted from. The extracted DLL files will be added to ILSpy automatically.
• Remove Costura Module Initializer: This option will remove the AssemblyLoader.Attach(); call in the module initializer in order to ignore all embedded references. This is required if one wants to patch any of the embedded references and use them in the actual assembly. The original embedded references will still be in the resources of a binary, but they will be ignored in favour of the previously extracted DLL files.

Building

Clone the ILSpy repository:

git clone https://github.com/icsharpcode/ILSpy.git

Copy the CosturaPlugin folder to the ILSpy directory. Then open ILSpy.sln in Visual Studio and add CosturaPlugin/CosturaPlugin.csproj as existing project. Then just build the CosturaPlugin project.