Check GAC for an assembly

Question

How to programmatically check GAC for an assembly?

Solution 1

Without even trying to get complicated, you could just shell out to gacutil and capture the output. For example, gacutil /l Microsoft.Practices.Unity gives me:

Microsoft (R) .NET Global Assembly Cache Utility.  Version 3.5.30729.1
Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation.  All rights reserved.

The Global Assembly Cache contains the following assemblies:
  Microsoft.Practices.Unity, Version=1.2.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31
bf3856ad364e35, processorArchitecture=MSIL

Number of items = 1

versus gacutil /l Some.Nonexistant.Assembly:

Microsoft (R) .NET Global Assembly Cache Utility.  Version 3.5.30729.1
Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation.  All rights reserved.

The Global Assembly Cache contains the following assemblies:

Number of items = 0

This is easy to implement and parse and isn't dependent on any third-party implementations.

Solution 2

It's better to use ReflectionOnlyLoad Method. this method loads an assembly into the reflection-only context, where it can be examined but not executed.

Solution 3

From .NET, the reflection API - Assembly.Load(...) will throw a FileNotFoundException if it does not find the assembly. The API requires a fully qualified assembly name, so I assume it must be in the GAC. I am using it to test for the presence of SQL Server Compact Edition:

Assembly foo = Assembly.Load("System.Data.SqlServerCe, Version=3.5.1.0, " +
    "Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91");

Solution 4

You can use the Fusion COM API. Junfeng Zhang wrote a managed wrapper. It's from 2004, though, so I don't know how well it works anymore.

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