ApiReviewHelper

A tool to help see the public API of a .NET assembly, and show the differences in the that API since the last time the tool was run.

How To Use The Tool To See Your Public API

1. Download the release and extract it to a temporary directory.
2. Create a working folder. I call mine apidiff
3. In your working folder, create a file called AssemblyList.txt. This file should contain the paths to all the assemblies you want to analyze (one per line). For example:
4. Open a shell (cmd or PowerShell) and change to your working folder.
5. Create an HTML baseline using the following syntax: ApiReviewHelper.exe create-baseline .\AssemblyList.txt .\baseline.html HTML (you will probably need to specify the full path to the EXE).
6. You can now view baseline.html, which will show the entire public API of your .NET assembly.

How To See The Changes In Your API

1. Create an initial baseline in XML format using syntax like the following: ApiReviewHelper.exe create-baseline .\AssemblyList.txt .\baseline-original.xml XML
2. Make whatever changes to your code you want.
3. Create a new baseline to compare using a command like ApiReviewHelper.exe create-baseline .\AssemblyList.txt .\baseline-new.xml XML
4. Create an HTML file showing the diff using a command like ApiReviewHelper.exe create-diff .\baseline-original.xml .\baseline-new.xml .\diff.html
5. Open diff.html in a web browser to see the differences.

Example AssemblyList.txt

c:\src\MyProject\bin\Debug\MyProject.dll
c:\src\MyProject\bin\Debug\MyLibrary.dll