C# Reflection: Get *all* active assemblies in a solution?

Question

Heres my problem:

I have 2 projects - one 'common' projects with acts like a library with all kinds of support code, and the actual program that uses said project in many of its calls. We'll call these projects "Common" and "Program". They are both in the same solution.

Within "Common", I have a class for commo reflection tasks, like creating an instance. If I call GetExecutingAssembly, it gets all the "Common" Types, however when I use GetEntryAssembly I get the "Program" types.

While I certainly could edit the code to work with 2 sets of asm, I'm afraid of a situation where there are more than just 2 projects in the solution - lets say 5 (don't know why, but lets just go there for now), and I'm afraid that calling GetExecutingAssembly and GetEntryAssembly will not get all the Types in the entire program.

Is there something else that i can do to get all the Types in a solution?

Answer 1

Assembly[] assemblies = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies();

This will get all of the loaded assemblies in the current AppDomain.

As noted in the comments, it's possible to spawn multiple AppDomains, in which case each can have its own assemblies. The immediate advantage to doing so is that you can unload Assemblies by unloading the containing AppDomain.

Answer 2

How about GetReferencedAssemblies to work off the AssemblyRef metadata entries? The 'solution' is not something that the CLR knows or cares about.. it deals in Assemblies.

private static List<Assembly> GetListOfEntryAssemblyWithReferences()
{
  List<Assembly> listOfAssemblies = new List<Assembly>();
  var mainAsm = Assembly.GetEntryAssembly();
  listOfAssemblies.Add(mainAsm);

  foreach (var refAsmName in mainAsm.GetReferencedAssemblies())
  {
    listOfAssemblies.Add(Assembly.Load(refAsmName));
  }
  return listOfAssemblies;
}

Caveats:
1. You still need to filter core assemblies System.* 2. This just goes one level deep in the ref chain.. but can be done recursively - with more code.

Answer 3

Also: Some assemblies are not loaded straight away, so you should also put an Event Handler on the AppDomain's assembly load event.

AppDomain.CurrentDomain.AssemblyLoad += ....