.NET Reflector Fail - Windows 7 64-bit

Question

Has anyone else had issues using Redgate's .NET Reflector on Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit? I'm getting an error saying:

"Unable to find a version of the runtime to run this application."

1. Any ideas what's going on with this?
2. Anyone have alternative recommendations for a .NET object browser? I'm thinking lightweight tools, not like Visual Studio.

Thanks, Trevor Sullivan

Answer 1

That's fairly odd. I run reflector.exe on a number of Windows 7, both 32 and 64 bit, machines and I don't see any issues.

Did you copy this installation from another machine vs. fresh install? If so it's possible that there is a issue in the .config file preventing you from running reflector. Try deleting the reflector.exe.config file (and all other files related to reflector other than the .exe) and see if that fixes the issue.

Answer 2

Windows 7 comes with .NET 3.5 SP1 pre-installed. One possible source of the problem is having Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 installed before you did the Win7 upgrade. The upgrade will destroy the .NET 4.0 configuration, all programs that use the default version of the CLR will no longer work correctly. I found a workaround for it but I strongly recommend you reinstall Win7, now selecting a clean install rather than an upgrade.

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Strike that. The info we were missing is that you copied it into the system32 folder. That folder is virtualized in a 64-bit version of Windows. A 32-bit app will see the syswow64 folder instead. That is an issue with Reflector, it has config flags (visible with corflags.exe) that forces it to run in 32-bit mode. Accordingly, it can't find its .exe.config file.