Finding property usage counts with reflection

Question

I have a generated file with around 10,000 public static properties and methods. I suspect that a nontrivial number of them are entirely unused, but there are around 50 assemblies and millions of lines of code to check to be sure.

What I would like to do is run some kind of utility that can look into all of the compiled assemblies we have and tell me exactly which members of this class are being called, and give me counts for each one.

Is such a thing possible with reflection, or do I need to revert to actual code analysis tools? Are there any libraries that can analyze assemblies to find their dependencies within another assembly?

Answer 1

The ReSharper "Find Usages Advanced" feature has an option to find references in Libraries as well as in the current Solution. I haven't used this particular feature, so I'm not sure how well it works (the Find Usages within a solution works quite nicely), but you can get a trial version of ReSharper and try it. My guess is that you'll need to run it from a Solution that has a Project with references to the various Libraries you're interested in.

Answer 2

I don't think this can be done with "regular" reflection, since usages cannot be detected by looking only at the structure of the classes. I guess you'll need to disassemble the IL and analyze it, looking for call, calli, and callvirt instructions (property lookups are also method calls). You can get the IL for a method with typeof(SomeType).GetMethod("Method").GetMethodBody().GetILAsByteArray(), but it might be hard to analyze it when it's in the form of a byte array. You might want to look into Cecil, which might help you analyze the bytecode.

Of course, there might well exist tools for this already.