Question

Is it possible to get an abstract type from a given Assembly at runtime?

I am currently loading my assembly with:

Assembly assem = Assembly.LoadFrom("MyAssemblyName.dll");

But then I want to do this:

Type t = assem.GetType("Enterprise.Shared_Party_PersonType");

My class is defined as:

public abstract class Shared_Party_PersonType

But type t is returning null.

My final goal is to navigate an abstract class with reflection and get a list
of properties of that abstract class, similar to what they do here: access-to-properties-of-abstract-class-with-reflection

Any help will be very appreciated.

Solution: Turns out that I was loading the wrong version of the DLL, which didn’t contain the abstract type I was trying to load. However, now I know that you can navigate and manipulate abstract types with reflection as any other concrete type. Also I learned about Assembly.RefelectionOnlyLoadFrom method thanks to @Fuex to load an assembly in reflection-only context

Answer 1

Maybe your class is defined inside some other class. In that case you must use a + (plus) instead of a . (dot). Like this:

assem.GetType("OutermostNamespace.InnerNamespace.Enterprise+Shared_Party_PersonType")

where Enterprise is an “outer” class or struct that Shared_Party_PersonType is defined inside.

Otherwise, can you access the source code of MyAssemblyName.dll? Then you might try to se what string n = typeof(Shared_Party_PersonType).FullName returns in there, to check if the type name is really what you presume.