How can I tell from the assembly name, or assembly class (or others like it), whether an assembly is part of the .NET framework (that is, System.windows.Forms)?
So far I’ve considered the PublicKeyToken, and CodeBase properties, but these are not always the same for the whole framework.
The reason I want this information is to get a list of assemblies that my EXE file is using that need to be on client machines, so I can package the correct files in a setup file without using the Visual Studio setup system. The problem is, I don’t want to pick up any .NET framework assemblies, and I want it to be an automatic process that is easy to roll out whenever a major update is finished.
The ultimate solution would be that there is an IsFramework property… 🙂
I suspect that the method both most reliable and most general is going to be the PublicKeyToken. Yes, there’s more than one, but it’s going to be a finite list and one that doesn’t change very often.
For that matter, you could just have a whitelist of assembly names — that list, too, will be both finite and static between versions of the framework.