Building AvaloniaILSpy from Source: Cross-Platform ILSpy Tutorial

What is AvaloniaILSpy? How is it different from ILSpy?

ILSpy is a popular .NET assembly decompiler, but its official GUI is only available for Windows. AvaloniaILSpy is a cross-platform fork of ILSpy, built with the Avalonia UI framework, providing a native graphical user interface (GUI) for Linux, macOS, and Windows. If you want a full-featured ILSpy GUI on Linux or macOS, AvaloniaILSpy is the best choice. The maxkatz6/AvaloniaILSpy fork is more up-to-date than the original.

Prerequisites

• .NET 6 or above (Installation Guide)
• PowerShell (Installation Guide)
• git installed on your system

Building from Source

Video Tutorial

1. Clone the Repository

Clone the latest AvaloniaILSpy repository (shallow clone for speed):

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/maxkatz6/AvaloniaILSpy.git
cd AvaloniaILSpy

2. Restore Tools and Build

Restore required tools and build the project:

dotnet tool restore
dotnet cake

3. Locate the Artifacts

After the build completes, binaries will be in the artifacts subdirectory.

4. Run AvaloniaILSpy

For example, on Linux 64-bit:

cd artifacts/linux-64/
./ILSpy

Static Builds

Download Pre-built Binaries

If you do not want to build from source, you can download the latest pre-built binaries (static builds) for your platform from the official GitHub Releases page:

• Linux (arm64, x64)
• macOS (arm64, x64)
• Windows (arm64, x64)

Just download the appropriate .zip file, extract it, and run the executable.

Video Tutorial: Downloading and Running Pre-built AvaloniaILSpy

Additional Information

• AvaloniaILSpy provides a full-featured GUI on all major platforms.
• For more details, see the AvaloniaILSpy GitHub repository.