Parsing assembly qualified name?

Question

I would like to parse an assembly qualified name in .NET 3.5. In particular, the assembly itself is not available, it's just the name. I can think of many ways of doing it by hand but I guess I might be missing some feature to do that in the system libraries. Any suggestion?

Answer 1

The AssemblyName class can parse the assembly name for you, just pass in the string to its constructor. If you have an assembly qualified type name, I think you'll have to strip of the type part of the string first (ie everything up to the first comma).

Answer 2

There is a parser implementation in Mono and BNF grammar on MSDN

Answer 3

From .Net 4 and on you have a new override for Type.GetType:

public static Type GetType(
    string typeName,
    Func<AssemblyName, Assembly> assemblyResolver,
    Func<Assembly, string, bool, Type> typeResolver,
    bool throwOnError,
    bool ignoreCase
)

See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee332784%28v=vs.100%29.aspx

What you need to do is in the example of the above documentation:

Type t2 = Type.GetType(test,
            (aName) => aName.Name == "MyAssembly" ? 
                Assembly.LoadFrom(@".\MyPath\v5.0\MyAssembly.dll") : 
                Assembly.Load(aName),
            (assem, name, ignore) => assem == null ? 
                Type.GetType(name, false, ignore) : 
                assem.GetType(name, false, ignore), true
);

You may replace the above lambdas with more complex functions.

Answer 4

There is a class TypeIdentifier in Alphaleonis.Reflection.Metadata (also available from NuGet) that can parse an assembly qualified name (as well as a full type name or simple type name), and deconstruct it and allow modifications to it.

Answer 5

If assembly loaded you can use something like that:

    Assembly assembly = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly();
    string assemblyName = assembly.GetName().Name;

In the example above I used an executing assembly but you loop through your loaded assembly.

Update: You always can load an assembly in a separate AppDomain get the assembly name and after you are done, unload it. Let me know if you need a sample.