Red Gate Assuming Responsibility For .NET Reflector’s Future

Red Gate has announced that they have reached an agreement with Lutz Roeder (announcement) to assume responsibility for the one tool that should be in every .NET developers toolbox.

This is a little disconcerting. Reflector has been a great resource and I’ve used it as a learning aide and a diagnostic tool for pretty much my entire .NET career. Lutz Roeder is the creator of Reflector and has been the lone steward for the tool since it’s inception. He’s kept the tool focused, clean, uncluttered and consistent. Will the Red Gate team do the same?

This could be a big PR win for Red Gate if they play their cards right. I know that Red Gate has experience with releasing some very handy utilities, the PInvoke Visual Studio Add-in and some of their out-dated and other experimental technologies are freely available via Red Gate Labs. But will they try to “improve” on as popular a tool as Reflector. Are there plans to “brand” the tool? Will they integrate support for their commercial line of products thereby making Reflector uncomfortable to use if you don’t have their other products installed? Will they require that to download Reflector you have to bundle up their other products? How about tools like TestDriven.NET that can automatically download Reflector and integrate with Visual Studio?

Hopefully, this will be a good thing, but Reflector is already a really good thing. I just hope their sales and marketing team understand this. Don’t mess with success.