Recipe 13.1. Listing Referenced AssembliesProblemYou need to determine each assembly imported by a particular assembly. This information can show you if this assembly is using one or more of your assemblies or if your assembly is using another specific assembly. SolutionUse the Assembly.GetReferencedAssemblies method, as shown in Example 13-1, to obtain the imported assemblies of an assembly. Example 13-1. Using the Assembly.GetReferencedAssemblies method
This code returns a string[] containing the original assembly, all imported assemblies, and the dependent assemblies of the imported assemblies. If you ran this method against the assembly C:\CSharpRecipes\bin\Debug\CSharpRecipes.exe, you'd get the following dependency tree: C:\CSharpRecipes\bin\Debug\CSharpRecipes.exe mscorlib, Version=2.0.3600.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089 System, Version=2.0.3600.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089 System.Configuration, Version=2.0.3600.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a System.Xml, Version=2.0.3600.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089 System.Security, Version=2.0.3600.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a System.Web.RegularExpressions, Version=2.0.3600.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Soap, Version=2.0.3600.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a DiscussionObtaining the imported types in an assembly is useful in determining what assemblies another assembly is using. This knowledge can greatly aid in learning to use a new assembly. This method can also help determine dependencies between assemblies for shipping purposes. The GetreferencedAssemblies method of the System.Reflection.Assembly class obtains a list of all the imported assemblies. This method accepts no parameters and returns an array of AssemblyName objects instead of an array of Types. The AssemblyName type is made up of members that allow access to the information about an assembly, such as the name, version, culture information, public/private key pairs, and other data. Note that this method does not account for assemblies loaded using the Assembly.ReflectionOnlyLoad* methods, as it is inspecting for only compile-time references.
See AlsoSee the "Assembly Class" topic in the MSDN documentation. |