Intoduction:

Most of the .NET compatible languages (like C# or VB.NET) while creating managed code, translate your source code into Microsoft intermediate language (MSIL), which is a CPU-independent set of instructions that can be efficiently converted to native code. MSIL (or simply IL) includes instructions for loading, storing, initializing, and calling methods on objects, as well as instructions for arithmetic and logical operations, control flow, direct memory access, exception handling, and other operations. So, it is not wrong to say that IL is the base language for all .NET languages.

DotNet framework provides the following tools for working with IL code:

• MSIL Assembler (ILAsm.exe) The MSIL Assembler generates a portable executable (PE) file from IL files.
• MSIL Disassembler (ILDAsm.exe) The MSIL Disassembler is a companion tool to the MSIL Assembler. Ildasm.exe takes a portable executable (PE) file that contains Microsoft intermediate language (MSIL) code and creates a text file suitable as input to Ilasm.exe.

This presents a very interesting and powerful option of doing round-trip engineering. MSIL round-trip technology gives you the ability to convert an assembly into IL (using MSIL Disassembler - Ildasm.exe), making modifications to the IL file and then reassembling the IL (using MSIL Assembler -ilasm.exe) to produce the modified assembly.

Think also of the ability to do all this programmatically.
A very powerful example of this possibility is to create an Aspect compiler for doing Aspect Oriented Programming in DotNet. This compiler could convert any assembly into IL, inject aspect code into it, and reassemble it to created the aspected assembly!!

Objective:

The objective of this project is to create a managed parser for MSIL (Microsoft Intermediate Language). This parser can be used to create an IL 'CodeDOM graph' or 'CodeDOM tree'. With this the user should be able to navigate through the IL code and be able to programmatically add/remove IL code.
As a first step towards this, I have created an IL lexical analyzer and an IL grammar analyzer. I used a tool called GOLD parser builder which is similar to lex and yacc.

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