Programmatically inspect .NET code

Question

I am looking for a way to programmatically inspect a .NET (C#, VB.NET,..) source code to perform static code analysis.

I'd like to perform queries on the code such as: - list classes whose name begin by x - list all the subclasses of x - list methods which instanciate an object of class x - determine if method x contains a variable named y - list methods calling the method y - ...

What I am looking for is an API or something else allowing me to write programs able to examine a source code.

Answer 1

NDepend gives a SQL-like query language for querying .NET code structure.

Answer 2

You can use System.Reflection, that should do the trick nicely for some of the things you want. As far as getting into the IL itself, check out Mono's Cecil.