Understanding the Visual Studio Integration Pack (VSIP)

Spices.Net is a standalone package that works fine for most developers who won't need to use it every day. For a slightly higher cost, you can obtain a copy of Spices.Net that integrates with Visual Studio. The VSIP version includes a number of features that make it easier to perform analysis on your code. Of course, the obvious advantage is that you don't have to leave the Visual Studio environment to perform Spices.Net tasks.

The integration lets you perform modifications to your Visual Basic.NET and Visual C#.NET applications that make it easier to analyze your applications. In addition, you don't have to leave Visual Studio to perform the analysis, you can simply perform the task as part of your work within the IDE. The Spices.Net package doesn't currently support all Visual Studio languages and it doesn't provide any special projects, but 9Rays.Net says it plans to improve the level of integration in future projects.

Integration has a number of advantages. For one thing, you can specify that you want to obfuscate your code as part of the build process, which means you won't have any easily disassembled executables lying around. All you need to do is choose the solution in Solution Explorer and select the proper options in the Properties window, as shown in Figure 9. In addition, the integration feature lets you debug your applications that use obfuscated modules, as long as you don't remove the debugging information (the instructions clearly tell you how to perform this task).

Figure 9: Adding Spices.Net to your project is easy.

The Tools menu also contains a new entry that lets you use the various Spices.Net features including the browser, modeler, and PE information and metadata viewer. You'll also find an entry for changing some, but not all, of the Spices.Net settings. I found omissions such as the obfuscator settings interesting; the omission means you still have to use the main product to change these settings.

I kept running into odd fit-and-finish problems when working with VSIP. For example, when you open the Settings dialog box using the Tools | Spices.Net | Settings command, and then switch away to another application, the dialog box disappears from view and you can't bring it back. Unfortunately, clicking anywhere on the IDE produces a beep, making it impossible to change anything. I finally ended up closing my project using Task Manager; not the best way to close a project if you want to use it later.

It's also disconcerting to see that the Settings dialog box includes all of the .NET Framework 1.1 libraries, not the .NET Framework 2.0 libraries, when you choose integration with Visual Studio 2005. The test system had both Visual Studio 2003 and Visual Studio 2005 installed side-by-side. This problem doesn't seem to occur when you have just Visual Studio 2005 installed on a computer. If you do have a side-by-side configuration, you need to open the Settings dialog box and change the Search Paths properties, or you'll continuously see messages that Visual Studio 2005 can no longer find the DLLs it requires when using the newer .NET Framework 2.0 features.

Bottom Line

The Spices.Net suite does a lot of things right. If they happen to be the tasks you need to perform, this product is well worth the price. Its forté is low-level analysis — analysis at a level that I haven't seen any other product tackle.

However, I probably wouldn't buy the VSIP version because of its current bugs, unless you plan to use Spices.Net every day. The external program carries fewer problems and works better than the integrated version.

Overall, the Spices.Net suite has far more bugs that I would expect from a released product; it's more like a good beta. Combine these issues with documentation that leaves a lot to the imagination and you have to think about this purchase for a while. Yes, it does a lot right, but you'll need to answer the question of whether there's enough right to overcome the wrong.