How can I read the assembly instructions of a C program from C#?

Question

I want to be able to do what an ordinary disassembler does—list the assembler instructions of an arbitrary executable—but from C#. It would consist, for instance, of finding a specific instruction from its address and determining which memory address is accessed by it.

Any Google search I tried leads me rather to the resources which explain how to decompile C# applications themselves in order to get IL bytecode. Except that I don't care about IL bytecode: what I want is to get the actual instructions of any app, including ones written in plain C or any other language.

In other words, I want the same thing as in How can I see the assembly code for a C++ program? question, but to be able to do it programmatically instead of using a GUI tool.

How do I do that?

Answer 1

here is a possible way and it is open source
capstone.NET

:\>nuget list capstone*
Gee.External.Capstone 1.2.2    
:\>cd Desktop    
:\>md capnet    
:\>cd capnet    
:\>nuget install Gee.External.Capstone
Successfully installed 'Gee.External.Capstone 1.2.2' to C:\xxx\capnet    
:\>md testcap    
:\>cd testcap    
:\>copy ..\Gee.External.Capstone.1.2.2\content\capstone.dll .
        1 file(s) copied.    
:\>copy ..\Gee.External.Capstone.1.2.2\lib\net45\Gee.External.Capstone.dll .
        1 file(s) copied.    
:\>cat capy.cs
using System;
using Gee.External.Capstone;
public class Dissy
{
    public static void Main()
    {
        var dis = CapstoneDisassembler.CreateX86Disassembler(DisassembleMode.Bit32);
        var code = new byte[] {  0x8d, 0x4c, 0x32, 0x08, 0x01, 0xd8, 0x81 };
        var res = dis.DisassembleAll(code);
        foreach(var a in res) {
            Console.WriteLine("{0}\t{1}",a.Mnemonic , a.Operand);
        }
    }
}
:\>csc /r:Gee.External.Capstone.dll capy.cs
Microsoft (R) Visual C# Compiler version 1.1.0.51109
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.   

:\>capy.exe
lea     ecx, dword ptr [edx + esi + 8]
add     eax, ebx