System.Reflection.Assembly Class

public class Assembly

Base Types

Object
  Assembly

Assembly

mscorlib

Library

RuntimeInfrastructure

Summary

Defines a Assembly , which is a reusable, versionable, and self-describing building block of an application.

Description

An assembly is a reusable, versionable, self-describing deployment unit for types and resources. Assemblies are the fundamental units of deployment, and consist of collections of types and resources that are built to work together and form logical units of functionality.

An assembly consists of the following two logical elements:

• The sets of types and resources that form some logical unit of functionality.
• A manifest, which is the metadata that describes how the types and resources of an assembly relate and what they depend on to work properly.

The following information is captured in an assembly manifest:

• Identity. An assembly's identity includes its simple name (also called its weak name), a version number, an optional culture if the assembly contains localized resources, and an optional public key used to guarantee name uniqueness and to "protect" the name from unwanted reuse.
• Contents. Assemblies contain types and resources. The manifest lists the names of all the types and resources that are visible outside the assembly, along with information about where they can be found within the assembly.
• Dependencies. Each assembly explicitly describes other assemblies that it is dependent upon. Included in this dependency information is the version of each dependency that was present when the manifest was built and tested. In this way the "known good" configuration is recorded and can be reverted to in case of failures due to version mismatches.
• Requested Permissions. As an assembly is being built, the assembly records the set of permissions that the assembly requires to run.

[Note: For additional information about assemblies, see Partition II of the CLI Specification.]

See Also

System.Reflection Namespace

Members

Assembly Methods

Assembly.CreateInstance Method
Assembly.GetType Method
Assembly.GetTypes Method
Assembly.Load Method
Assembly.ToString Method

Assembly Properties

Assembly.FullName Property

System.Reflection.Assembly Class, System.Reflection Namespace

Returns the Type object with the specified name defined in the current assembly.

Parameters

name

A String containing the name of the type defined in the current assembly.

Return Value

A Type object that represents the specified type, or null if the specified Type was not found.

Exceptions

Exception Type	Condition
ArgumentException	name is equal to System.String.Empty or starts with the null character ('\0').
ArgumentNullException	name is null .

Description

[Behaviors: As described above.]

See Also

System.Reflection.Assembly Class, System.Reflection Namespace

An array of type Type containing all of the types defined in the current assembly.

See Also

System.Reflection.Assembly Class, System.Reflection Namespace

assemblyString

A String containing the name of the assembly.

Return Value

The loaded Assembly .

Exceptions

Exception Type	Condition
ArgumentNullException	assemblyString is null .
ArgumentException	assemblyString is equal to System.String.Empty or starts with the null character ('\0').
FileNotFoundException	The Assembly identified by assemblyString was not found.
BadImageFormatException	The Assembly identified by assemblyString is not a valid assembly.

See Also

System.Reflection.Assembly Class, System.Reflection Namespace

Returns a String representation of the value of the current instance.

Return Value

A String representation of the current instance. The string takes into account the current system culture.

Description

This method returns the System.Reflection.Assembly.FullName of the current assembly.

[Note: This method overrides System.Object.ToString .]

Example

The following example demonstrates the use of the System.Reflection.Assembly.ToString method in an assembly compiled into a file named "HelloWorld".

using System;
using System.Reflection;

public class AssemblyExample {
 public static void Main() {

 Assembly a = Assembly.Load("helloworld");
 Console.WriteLine(a.ToString());
 } 
}

The output is

HelloWorld, Version=0.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null

See Also

System.Reflection.Assembly Class, System.Reflection Namespace

A String containing the full name of the assembly.

Description

This property is read-only.

[Behaviors: As described above.]

[Default: The full name is returned in the following format:

<assemblyTextualName>, Version=<major.minor.build.revision>, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=<publicKeyToken>

[Note: The <assemblyTextualName> section of the string contains the textual name of the assembly, and is equivalent to the name of the file into which the assembly manifest is compiled. This name does not change even if the file with the assembly manifest is later renamed. For additional information about assembly manifests, see Partition II of the CLI Specification.

For information on the Version information in the full name of a Assembly, see Version.

The <publicKeyToken> is a String containing the value of the public key token in hexadecimal format. A null publicKeyToken indicates that the current assembly is private. For additional information about public keys and public key tokens, see Partition II of the CLI Specification.

]

]

[Usage: This property is used by the System.Reflection.Assembly.ToString method.]

Example

The following example demonstrates using the System.Reflection.Assembly.FullName property to get the full name of an assembly compiled into a file named "HelloWorld".

using System;
using System.Reflection;

public class AssemblyExample {
 public static void Main() {

 Assembly a = Assembly.Load("helloworld");
 Console.WriteLine(a.FullName);
 } 
}
   

The output is

HelloWorld, Version=0.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null

See Also

System.Reflection.Assembly Class, System.Reflection Namespace