Question

I want to get a type from an unreferenced assembly. I used this answer to solve my problem.

The problem now is, that I’m loading the type ObjectList which contains another type from another assembly. I do it like this:

Assembly assembly = Assembly.LoadFrom ("@c:\myAssemblies\myAssembly.Data.DomainObjects.dll");
Type myType = assembly.GetType ("myAssembly.Data.DomainObjects.ObjectList`1[[myAssembly.otherNamespace.myClass, myAssembly.otherNamespace, Version=1.13.73.1082, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=fee00910d6e5f53b]]");

The assembly with the otherNamespace is also not referenced and therefore the GetType method returns null. My question now is:

Is it possible to get the type of an object list which contains another type of an unreferenced assembly? Or: How can I load the assembly of a type within my ObjectList?

Answer 1

Ok, this is a little hard for me to test – but I hope my answer can be converted:

basically, you need to do it in two steps –

1. resolve the generic parameter type (myAssembly.otherNamespace.myClass, in your case)
2. generate the new type, based on type of the generic parameter.

Here’s a Linqpad script:

void Main()
{
    //resolve the inner type
    var  parameterType = Type.GetType("UserQuery+GenericParameter");

    //Use the generic type, and generate with the inner parameter type
    var genericTypeWithParameter = Type.GetType("UserQuery+Moop`1")
        .MakeGenericType(parameterType);

    //The resolved type - printed to console
    genericTypeWithParameter.Dump();
}

public class Moop <T> { }
public class GenericParameter { }