What exactly is the 'Anonymously Hosted DynamicMethods Assembly' and how can I make it load manually?

Question

As a .NET developer, the line

'<process name>' (Managed): Loaded 'Anonymously Hosted DynamicMethods Assembly'

probably is familiar to you. My question is simple and straightforward: what exactly is this 'Anonymously Hosted DynamicMethods Assembly' and can I make it (pre)load manually? If so, how? Can this be done via Assembly.Load(...)?

Answer 1

This is for DynamicMethods and thus goes for expressions too.

You cannot load it manually.

Answer 2

System.Reflection.Emit contains classes that allows you to create dynamically generated code by emitting IL instructions. The DynamicMethod and AssemblyBuilder classes are the work-horses for doing so. IL normally is loaded from an assembly, but there is no assembly when you generate the IL dynamically. An assembly object is however needed to act as the container of the IL code and a "fake" one is created by AppDomain.DefineDynamicAssembly(). That's what you see in the debugger notification.

You can't use Assembly.Load(), the assembly is created dynamically.

Answer 3

Hi

I guess that this is an assembly emitted at run time. Since it's not required to save the assembly to disk, it may not be possible to load it manually (in this case when the code finishes emitting the assembly - into memory - it will use the types defined in the assembly directly - no need to load anything)

For more information see the documentation in msdn.

Best