Is there a good pattern for naïve assembly initialization?

Say we have several assemblies, and they all implement IAnimal, and we'd like go to one place to find out about the presence of the other IAnimal imple开发者_开发知识库mentation.

features:

• we don't want pre-knowledge outside of an assembly

• there could be a register class / method within the assembly

• it is preferable not to use reflection. So far this seems to be the only way though

discussion:

I imagined doing this statically via inheritance, however, I'm not aware of an assembly level initialization sequence.

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I suggest taking a look at MEF. It is practically designed for this kind of thing.

It does use reflection, as this is the mechanism created for such dynamic discovery. I doubt you will find a solution that doesn't use some level of reflection.

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When starting your app you could register to the AssemblyLoad of your AppDomain:

AppDomain.CurrentDomain.AssemblyLoad += new AssemblyLoadEventHandler(NewAssemblyLoaded);

and define NewAssemblyLoad to add the IAnimal implementations to a list of Types (e.g. animalTypes) you maintain:

static void NewAssemblyLoaded(object sender, AssemblyLoadEventArgs args)
{
    Assembly anAss = args.LoadedAssembly;
    foreach (Type t in Assembly.GetTypes())
    {
        if (!t.IsInterface && typeof(IAnimal).IsAssignableFrom(t))
            animalsList.Add(t);
    }
}

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I've written an extension method which allows you to look up deployed Types which match certain criteria at runtime - it does use Reflection, but you may find it useful.

IEnumerable<Type> animalTypes = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly()
    .GetAvailableTypes(
        typeFilter: t => !t.IsInterface && typeof(IAnimal).IsAssignableFrom(t));