Get paths of assemblies used in Type

Question

I need a method that takes a Type and returns the paths of all assemblies that used in the type. I wrote this:

public static IEnumerable<string> GetReferencesAssembliesPaths(this Type type)
{   
 yield return type.Assembly.Location;

 foreach (AssemblyName assemblyName in type.Assembly.GetReferencedAssemblies())
 {
  yield return Assembly.Load(assemblyName).Location;
 }
}

Generally this method do the job, but have some disadvantages:

• I didn't found how to get the referenced assemblies/types from the type itself, so i used type.Assembly.GetReferencedAssemblies() and got the references of the whole assembly, not just those that related to the type.

• type.Assembly.GetReferencedAssemblies() returns AssemblyName and has no location/path/filepath property. To get the location property, i first used Assembly.Load() and then used the location property. I dont want load assemblies to get their path, because they not necessary used, and because Assembly.Load() can fail with FileNotFoundException or BadImageFormatException.

Answer 1

I think i solved the Assembly.Load() problem by replacing it to Assembly.ReflectionOnlyLoad().

now this is how my method looks like:

public static IEnumerable<string> GetReferencesAssembliesPaths(this Type type)
{           
    yield return type.Assembly.Location;

    foreach (AssemblyName assemblyName in type.Assembly.GetReferencedAssemblies())
    {
        yield return Assembly.ReflectionOnlyLoad(assemblyName.FullName).Location;
    }
}

now the only left problem is the type.Assembly.GetReferencedAssemblies(), how do i get referenced assemblies from the type rather than from the assembly?

Answer 2

type.Assembly.GetReferencedAssemblies() will return all the assemblies that are referenced by the assembly in which the type is declared. This doesn't mean that the assemblies you will get with this function have anything in common with the given type.