How to get a programmatic list of all loaded assemblies (referenced) in the .NET Compact Framework

Question

I am running on Windows CE and using the Compact Framework. I need to get a list of all reference assemblies that my application has loaded. It would be nice to be able to get to the AssemblyName (object) of these assemblies.

An example is like getting my running assembly by doing: Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly(); except I need to get the reference to all the other loaded assemblies (3rd party Dlls).

The full framework has the Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().GetReferencedAssemblies() method but it's not available on the Compact Framework. Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

I guess if there is no API to do this you can try this out ...

Remember, this is not a good way to do this ...

1. Look for PInvoke calls in Windows CE and call those to figure out what dlls are loaded by the process.

2. Then iterate through the dlls to check if they have a CLI header. Or you can just try to load the dll as assembly, if it loads then it is a .NET assembly loaded by the application.

I know its not a right way to do this, but this might work.

Answer 2

Based on this it would appear that managed dll's are not truly 'loaded' in the sense that they are in the conventional framework. Instead the IL is memory mapped and the JIT just grabs what it needs as it goes along (saving having to maintain a load of memory for code that has executed but is no longer used)

This would explain why the CF provides no way to iterate over the loaded dll's. As to why it doesn't allow iterating over the referenced dlls which are an entirely complie time construct...

As a possible work around:
Use GetExecutingAssembly to get the active code. Ensure that this happens in your executable so it gets the root assembly.

Write some code capable of parsing the dll for the manifest indicating which assemblies are referenced (this need not be managed code - the unmanaged introspection API microsoft provides may even do this for you and the dll format specification is both public and unlikely to radically change in the near future). I suggest black listing dll's loaded from the GAC (though this may be unnecessary).