Compare assemblies

Last modified: 26 July 2023

dotPeek allows you to compare two assemblies or two different versions of the same assembly. Each comparison is presented as a separate top-level node in the Assembly Explorer; you can expand this node and see differences in the assembly structure right away, and in addition to that, you can double-click types, members and other elements to see a text-based comparison in the code viewer.

dotPeek: Assembly comparison node in the Assembly Explorer

Elements within the comparison node (types, members, files) are highlighted in different colors with the following meanings:

  • Green — the element is present in the second assembly and absent in the first assembly.

  • Red — the element is present in the first assembly and absent in the second assembly.

  • Violet — the element is present in both assemblies, and it has differences.

When you double-click an element with differences, the comparison opens in an external diff tool. If the diff tool is not specified, a dialog will appear where you can specify it:

dotPeek: Select Diff Tool dialog

If you have Visual Studio or KDiff installed on your machine, you can click the corresponding button to use one of these tools. Alternatively, specify the path to a diff tool and command line arguments to open the compared documents. The documents are referred to as $1 and $2. The selected tool and its arguments will be saved for later comparisons, and you can change it on the Diff page of dotPeek options Ctrl+Alt+S.

To finish comparing assemblies, select the comparison node and press Delete or right-click it and choose Remove Item from List.