How to get the assembly (System.Reflection.Assembly) for a given type in .Net?

Fabio de Miranda picture Fabio de Miranda · Jul 17, 2009 · Viewed 59.3k times · Source

In .Net, given a type name, is there a method that tells me in which assembly (instance of System.Reflection.Assembly) that type is defined?

I assume that my project already has a reference to that assembly, just need to know which one it is.

Answer

jpj625 picture jpj625 · Jul 17, 2009

Assembly.GetAssembly assumes you have an instance of the type, and Type.GetType assumes you have the fully qualified type name which includes assembly name.

If you only have the base type name, you need to do something more like this:

public static String GetAssemblyNameContainingType(String typeName) 
{
    foreach (Assembly currentassembly in AppDomain.CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies()) 
    {
        Type t = currentassembly.GetType(typeName, false, true);
        if (t != null) {return currentassembly.FullName;}
    }

    return "not found";
}

This also assumes your type is declared in the root. You would need to provide the namespace or enclosing types in the name, or iterate in the same manner.