Find Types in All Assemblies

Question

I need to look for specific types in all assemblies in a web site or windows app, is there an easy way to do this? Like how the controller factory for ASP.NET MVC looks acr

Answer 1

Most commonly you're only interested in the assemblies that are visible from the outside. Therefor you need to call GetExportedTypes() But besides that a ReflectionTypeLoadException can be thrown. The following code takes care of these situations.

public static IEnumerable FindTypes(Func predicate)
{
    if (predicate == null)
        throw new ArgumentNullException(nameof(predicate));

    foreach (var assembly in AppDomain.CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies())
    {
        if (!assembly.IsDynamic)
        {
            Type[] exportedTypes = null;
            try
            {
                exportedTypes = assembly.GetExportedTypes();
            }
            catch (ReflectionTypeLoadException e)
            {
                exportedTypes = e.Types;
            }

            if (exportedTypes != null)
            {
                foreach (var type in exportedTypes)
                {
                    if (predicate(type))
                        yield return type;
                }
            }
        }
    }
}