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.
• Dependency table — all referenced assemblies with their versions

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, the .NET shared framework, and any single-file bundles in scope. 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.