C#/.NET: Is there a way to force all referenced assemblies to be loaded into the app domain?

Question

My projects are set up like this:

• Project "Definition"
• Project "Implementation"
• Project "Consumer"

Project "Consumer" references both "Definition" and "Implementation", but does not statically reference any types in "Implementation".

When the application starts, Project "Consumer" calls a static method in "Definition", which needs to find types in "Implementation"

Is there a way I can force any referenced assembly to be loaded into the App Domain without knowing the path or name, and preferably without having to use a full-fledged IOC framework?

Answer 1

You can use Assembly.GetReferencedAssemblies to get an AssemblyName[], and then call Assembly.Load(AssemblyName) on each of them. You'll need to recurse, of course - but preferably keeping track of assemblies you've already loaded :)

Answer 2

This seemed to do the trick:

        var loadedAssemblies = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies().ToList();
        var loadedPaths = loadedAssemblies.Select(a => a.Location).ToArray();

        var referencedPaths = Directory.GetFiles(AppDomain.CurrentDomain.BaseDirectory, "*.dll");
        var toLoad = referencedPaths.Where(r => !loadedPaths.Contains(r, StringComparer.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase)).ToList();
        toLoad.ForEach(path => loadedAssemblies.Add(AppDomain.CurrentDomain.Load(AssemblyName.GetAssemblyName(path))));

As Jon noted, the ideal solution would need to recurse into the dependencies for each of the loaded assemblies, but in my specific scenario I don't have to worry about it.

Answer 3

Daniel's example code here is excellent. Perfect solution for forcing assemblies referenced in Solution Explorer but not loaded by .Net runtime to be loaded. After this code has run, all assemblies are returned by AppDomain.CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies(). Beautiful stuff! (I gotta start using Linq more...)