Is there a way to force all referenced assemblies to be loaded into the app domain?

c# assemblies appdomain
Daniel Schaffer picture Daniel Schaffer · Mar 5, 2010 · Viewed 70.5k times · Source

My projects are set up like this:

  • Project "Definition"
  • Project "Implementation"
  • Project "Consumer"

Project "Consumer" references both "Definition" and "Implementation", but does not statically reference any types in "Implementation".

When the application starts, Project "Consumer" calls a static method in "Definition", which needs to find types in "Implementation"

Is there a way I can force any referenced assembly to be loaded into the App Domain without knowing the path or name, and preferably without having to use a full-fledged IOC framework?

Answer

Daniel Schaffer picture Daniel Schaffer · Mar 5, 2010

This seemed to do the trick:

var loadedAssemblies = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies().ToList();
var loadedPaths = loadedAssemblies.Select(a => a.Location).ToArray();

var referencedPaths = Directory.GetFiles(AppDomain.CurrentDomain.BaseDirectory, "*.dll");
var toLoad = referencedPaths.Where(r => !loadedPaths.Contains(r, StringComparer.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase)).ToList();

toLoad.ForEach(path => loadedAssemblies.Add(AppDomain.CurrentDomain.Load(AssemblyName.GetAssemblyName(path))));

As Jon noted, the ideal solution would need to recurse into the dependencies for each of the loaded assemblies, but in my specific scenario I don't have to worry about it.

Update: The Managed Extensibility Framework (System.ComponentModel) included in .NET 4 has much better facilities for accomplishing things like this.

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