Get Attributes of External Assemblies

Dominick Marciano

I'm trying to write a method that can take the path to any valid assembly and then analyze its attributes, such as title, company, and trademark, but especially custom attributes. Although I will want to get standard assembly attributes, my main purpose for this application is to get information from a custom attribute I created in another project that I add to most of my assemblies. I have already have a method that take an assembly as a parameter and can pull the information I need. I also have a method that displays an open file dialog window where a user can select a file and then the method determines if it is a valid assembly. What I can't figure out is how to take the path to the assembly file, create an assembly object from it, and then pass it to the method that get the attributes. He is a VERY stripped down version of the AssemblyAttributes class just to demonstrator the constructor that take an Assembly object. This class is not a concern; I have already tested all the code within this class by using the GetExecutingAssembly method and all the code worked fine:

Public Class AssemblyAttributes

Private _assembly as Assembly

Public Readonly Property Copyright as string
Get
Return GetCopyrightString
End Get
End Property

Public Sub New(assembly As Assembly)
_assembly = assembly
End Sub

End Class

And then I have my method, that gets called from a button's click event, which takes the path to an assembly (the stream writer is used later in code that is not shown to output the attribute information). This is the method where I have having trouble:

Private Sub GetAssemblyAttributes(assemblyName As String, ByRef sw As StreamWriter)

Dim currentAssembly As Assembly

Dim assemblyAttributes As New AssemblyAttributes(currentAssembly)
Dim copyright As String = assemblyAttributes.Copyright

End Sub

How can I using assemblyName to create the currentAssembly object? I have tried:

Dim currentAssembly As Assembly = Assembly.Load(name)

And got a FileLoadException and got the error message: Could not load file or assembly 'C:\\[PathToAssembly]\\[AssemblyTryingToAnalyze].dll' or one of its dependencies. The given assembly name or codebase was invalid. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131047) Next I tried:

Dim currentAssembly As Assembly = Assembly.LoadFile(name)

An

Richard Deeming

Have you tried Assembly.ReflectionOnlyLoadFrom[^]?

"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined." - Homer

Dominick Marciano

Wow...how did I miss that one?! I guess that is what I get for working on it till 3AM. I will take a look at that tonight when I get home. Thanks!

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