Home RE.NET FAQs

Visual Modeling Support

Our aim is to plug an obvious gap in the .NET design facilities provided by Rational Rose and Visual Studio .NET free-of-charge or at a low cost by offering minimal support. We'll maintain a list of frequently asked questions on this page and you can to offer suggestions for incorporation into future releases.

RE.NET FAQs

Q. The RE.NET utility produces a zero-length output file.

A. The assembly DLL that you are reverse engineering must be in the directory from which you issue the ReverseEngineer command, or in the Global Assembly Cache. And you must specify the DLL name without the .dll extension. So with Banking.dll in the same directory as ReverseEngineer.exe you can type...

ReverseEngineer -V Banking > Banking.cs

Q. Can I produce a UML representation of a COM component that has a .NET Interop wrapper?

A. Yes.

Q. Visual Studio .NET reports "Reverse Engineering Failed" when attempting to reverse engineer .NET framework classes.

A. Visual Studio .NET will report "Reverse engineering failed" and the Visio Output window will show numerous errors of the kind "An interface cannot be used as the type of a parameter". This is because the .NET Framework classes break certain UML 1.2 rules, so to hide these unavoidable errors you will need to disable Check semantic errors on UML element from the Visio UML / Options menu.

Q. Why are the class and method signatures of the .NET framework classes, and in the results produced by the RE.NET utility, not identical to the signatures shown in the Visual Studio .NET Object Browser?

A. We've had to make a few compromises in producing a solution that is compatible with both Rational Rose and Visual Studio .NET / Visio. We provide "representations" of the classes in UML, sufficiently accurate for you to refer to types (class and interfaces) and members (methods, properties and fields) in your design models. We are not expecting these UML representations to be used subsequently for code generation.

Q. Are these visual modeling solutions compatible with other modeling tools?

A. Your modeling tool might be compatible if it has a facility for reverse engineering C# source code. We'll provide a sample that you can test with your tool if you contact us. Users of Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect have taken this approach.