[freedompeace]

In case anyone doesn't know yet (and for future reference), ILSpy (http://wiki.sharpdevelop.net/ILSpy.ashx) is an open source alternative, and .NET Reflector was the first "popular" .NET decompiler that was used until they decided to force people to pay for it.

[saurik]

ahem Actually, I wrote the first .NET decompiler: Exemplar, with a GUI later called Anakrino; it was even quite popular. Microsoft actually used it as a test case for their compiler occasionally. ;P Reflector existed at the time, but it was not a decompiler: it was just a class browser and disassembler. He added the decompilation features due to pressure from Anakrino, to which I was adding class browser functionality (and was orders of magnitudes faster, as I hated waiting around for Reflector to analyze the binary, which used to take forever). (Incidentally, Anakrino was open source.)

[cfn]

I remember using Anakrino! That was a loong time ago and thanks for doing it. What happened?

[saurik]

To be totally honest, I think the most correct answer to "what happened?" is simply "I was 18" (maybe 19). There are a ton of other aspects to the story that involve a lot of political backstabbing (crossing even unto seemingly unrelated projects that were actually related through different means), but I now know that is "par for the course" (sadly), and were I to be me now back then you'd probably still be using Anakrino today.

[teyc]

did you work for another company then?

[saurik]

I am confused. At the time I wrote Anakrino I was a freshman (maybe a sophomore) at the College of Creative Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara. I did not have a job at that time: I wrote Exemplar over a weekend while visiting home to prove a point on the .NET beta mailing list (that decompilers would happen sooner, rather than later), and then wrote Anakrino to make it easier to use.

I had previously had jobs, but I had moved on as I went to college; back home, I had been working with/for a friend of mine, Patrick Dietzen, on a web design and consulting company, CyberUniverse, which he had started when he was a freshman in high school (he had to explain to his clients what the Internet was), and then (for a brief time) for one of our clients, Professional Response and Consulting, Inc., during that last summer.

At the beginning of my sophomore year, a friend of mine decided to take something I had been helping him with a few months prior (a video game he had been working on for many many years) and attempt to start a company with it, registering for the Center for Entrepreneurship and Engineering Management annual business plan competition: I was one of the people who worked with him on that project.

[teyc]

You are clearly very capable. What are you doing now?

[rao]

and then what happened?