General

The General tab (1) is the first thing you see when opening an assembly. It shows:

• Assembly identity — name, version, culture, public key token
• Target framework — which .NET version the assembly targets
• Architecture — AnyCPU, x64, ARM64, etc.
• PDB summary — whether portable debug information came from a sidecar, an embedded PDB, or was unavailable
• Dependency table — all referenced assemblies with their versions

Native AOT binaries

Opening a Native AOT executable adds a block below the standard fields. ILC strips ECMA-335 metadata, but every AOT image embeds a ReadyToRun header the runtime uses to find its module sections — dotsider validates that header and reports:

• Binary kind — Native AOT (.NET)
• ILC / RTR format — the ReadyToRun format version, section count, and header offset
• Runtime version — recovered from a version string the runtime pack embeds; shown as (not detected) when the layout doesn’t match (a heuristic, never a guess)
• Native imports — module and function counts from the native import table (the full table lives in the PE/Metadata tab)
• R2R sections — how many ReadyToRun runtime sections the header describes (the table is in the PE/Metadata tab)
• Recovered types — type and method counts recovered from the embedded metadata (the list is in the PE/Metadata tab)
• Frozen strings — how many frozen string literals were recovered (the list is in the Strings tab)
• Native symbols — the symbol count and its source (native PDB, DWARF, or dSYM), or — when none loaded — the reason: missing, identity mismatch, corrupt, or boundaries-only fallback (the table is in the PE/Metadata tab). Native DWARF materialization from ELF images and dSYM bundles is limited to 256 MiB per symbol read. Malformed line metadata omits source locations from otherwise readable symbols; oversized or wholly unreadable data is treated as corrupt and falls back to unwind boundaries when available. Native PDB MSF directories and CodeView module ranges are validated before materialization; malformed PDBs are reported as corrupt and use .pdata boundaries when available.

ReadyToRun images

A ReadyToRun (crossgen2) image keeps its full metadata and adds precompiled native bodies, so the standard fields stay and a ReadyToRun block is added, reporting the format version and status (Valid, Corrupt, or UnsupportedVersion — a broken header is surfaced, never hidden), the architecture, whether the image is a composite or a component (and its owner), and how many methods are precompiled. Inspect a method’s native code in tab 3’s IL + Native view or via --r2r-correlate.

WebAssembly modules

Opening dotnet.native.wasm from a browser-wasm publish adds a WebAssembly (.NET) block. The module has no ECMA-335 metadata of its own, so the dependency table is empty, but the General tab reports the Wasm version, section count, type/table/memory/global counts, element and data counts, the start function when present, defined/imported functions, code and data sizes, import/export counts, and whether dotnet.native.js.symbols was loaded for function names. Structured vectors are checked against their containing bytes and a shared 1,048,576-item budget before allocation. Malformed standard data leaves the safely decoded prefix visible and adds a Note explaining where parsing stopped. Function symbols and disassembly live in tab 3 and the PE/Metadata Symbols sub-tab.

Opening a Webcil app assembly from the same publish, for example _framework/MyApp.wasm, keeps the normal managed assembly view. The General tab adds a compact Managed Webcil (.NET) block showing the Webcil version, whether the payload was Wasm-wrapped, section count, and metadata size, while dependencies, metadata tables, IL, PDBs, and Source Link behave like any other managed assembly.

Text selection and copy

The Assembly Info panel is a read-only editor. Click into it or press Tab to move focus there, then select text with click-drag or Shift + arrow keys. Press y to yank the selection to the clipboard.

You can also use vim-style text objects: iw selects the word under the cursor, iW selects a whitespace-delimited WORD (handy for grabbing a version string or assembly name in one keystroke). yiw and yiW select and copy in one motion. V selects the entire line and yy copies it directly.

On the dependency table, focus a row and press y to copy it as tab-separated values. Press Tab to cycle focus between the info panel and the table.

Drill into references

Select any row in the dependency table and press Enter. For .NET Core / .NET 5+ assemblies, dotsider searches the app directory, NuGet’s global packages folder using the assembly’s .deps.json, the runtime directory, any single-file bundles in scope, and the .NET shared framework. Package and asset paths from .deps.json must resolve inside the named package; rooted, traversing, or link-redirected paths remain unresolved. For .NET Framework targets it walks the framework binder — app.config redirects, GAC, the framework runtime directory, configured <codeBase>, then the application base and <probing privatePath> — so drill-in lands on the same file the runtime would load. CLR 4 roots (net40 – net48) bind out of Microsoft.NET\assembly\GAC_* and the v4.0.30319 runtime; CLR 2 roots (.NET Framework 2.0 / 3.0 / 3.5 SP1, detected from the mscorlib v2 reference) bind out of %WINDIR%\assembly and the v2.0.50727 runtime. Press Esc to return.

This lets you walk an entire dependency chain without leaving the TUI — into framework assemblies like System.Runtime or mscorlib, into assemblies bundled inside a self-contained single-file executable, or into a redirected dependency whose loaded version differs from the version its metadata recorded.

For CLR 2 roots the assembly’s TargetFrameworkAttribute is typically absent (the attribute didn’t exist before .NET 4.0), so the General tab shows an inferred-runtime label rather than (unknown), and the Dynamic tab correctly identifies the assembly as .NET Framework so EventPipe tracing isn’t offered.