Find out dependencies of all DLLs?

Question

I have a collection of DLLs(say 20). How do I find out all the DLLs on which one specific DLL (say DLL A) is depending upon?

Answer 1

If you want the DLL's (the files) then, Assembly.GetReferencedAssemblies will also return the .Net Framework assemblies.

Here is a simple code snippet that will get the dll's it can find in the current directory (and also include some other related files):

private readonly string[] _extensions = { ".dll", ".exe", ".pdb", ".dll.config", ".exe.config" };

private string[] GetDependentFiles(Assembly assembly)
{
    AssemblyName[] asm = assembly.GetReferencedAssemblies();
    List paths = new List(asm.Length);
    for (int t = asm.Length - 1; t >= 0; t--)
    {
        for (int e = _extensions.Length - 1; e >= 0; e--)
        {
            string path = Path.GetFullPath(asm[t].Name + _extensions[e]);
            if (File.Exists(path)) paths.Add(path);
        }
    }

    return paths.ToArray();
}

You can call it like so: MessageBox.Show(string.Join("\r\n", GetDependentFiles(Assembly.GetEntryAssembly())));