I am looking at how the runtime locates assemblies and am wondering whether there is a way to just get the path of an assembly found by Assembly.Load rather than actually loading it?
The reason I need this is because AssemblyDefinition.ReadAssembly from Mono.Cecil requires a path directly to the assembly and won't go to the extra effort of trying to locate it for itself. I'd like instead to combine the functionalities of standard System.Reflection and Mono.Cecil.
Mono.Cecil uses assembly resolvers to get an AssemblyDefinition from an assembly name.
AssemblyNameReference reference = AssemblyNameReference.Parse("Foo, Version=1.0.0.0");
DefaultAssemblyResolver resolver = new DefaultAssemblyResolver();
AssemblyDefinition foo = resolve.Resolve(reference);
New Answer
You might be able to use AssemblyName. Unfortunately I'm not at my development machine so I can't test this. But AssemblyName is used in the mscorlib implementation of Assembly.Load().
I went diving into the CoreCLR to see if I could gain any insight into where the resolver actually looks for the file but was unsuccessful. If this doesn't work, you might try diving into the CLR yourself for answers. I narrowed it down to a FindAssembly call
var assemblyName = new AssemblyName("YourAssembly versionwhateveretc");
var path = new Uri(assemblyName.EscapedCodeBase).LocalPath;
Old Answer
Does ReflectionOnlyLoading work for you?
This should allow you to inspect/interact with the assembly metadata without fully loading it into the current AppDomain.
System.IO.FileLoadException: Cannot resolve dependency to assembly 'System.Core, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089' because it has not been preloaded. When using the ReflectionOnly APIs, dependent assemblies must be pre-loaded or loaded on demand through the ReflectionOnlyAssemblyResolve event. I'd like to avoid actually loading assemblies if possible due to various complexities most of which I am not even sure what they are.
Mono.Cecil instead of the standard reflection. Right now I have the problem that compiling the types in just 4 assemblies takes roughly 0.6s which is insane. I haven't bothered measuring just how long loading the assemblies via standard reflection would take, but now that I've decided on a rewrite of the interop module I am trying as much as possible to avoid touching standard reflection.
Assembly.Location?