How to identify core .NET Framework assemblies ?

Question

Is there a preferred way to identify core .net framework assemblies ? i.e. asm which are part of the framework ?

This is for a an application auto updater which

1) takes in an assembly using ASP.NET upload

2) checks it's assembly references

3) ensures they're available for deployment too

4) they're pulled as needed based on auth/authorization etc. etc

Part #3 is where it'd be good to check if they're part of the core framework

Answer 1

You can check the property Assembly.GlobalAssemblyCache to see if it's in the GAC, but I think that's the closest you can get without parsing Microsoft's name from the assembly company.

Answer 2

Assemblies have attributes that you can examine with reflection:

 object[] attribs = assembly.GetCustomAttributes();

You could take a look at the objects returned by that call in the debugger, and see if any are common across the assemblies you want to categorise.

Edit: And - what a surprise! - Jon Skeet has already posted an answer to a similar-but-not-identical question using this technique. Should work for you as well.

Answer 3

Here is a list based on the ECMA standard:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_Class_Library