Retrieving GAC Assemblies and Information

Retrieving GAC assemblies and their information. This was a question posed by one of my colleagues while he was developing a product. Now the answer to this is little tweaky.

Follow these steps to get information such as:-

1. Assembly Name
2. Version
3. PublicKeyToken

I prefer not to use Reflection for this purpose and solving by a simple File Iteration method.


Iterate through directories in GAC
System.IO.Directory.GetDirectories(@”C:WindowsAssemblyGAC”);
Now this GAC folder within Assembly is not visible in Windows Explorer, but you can see this on your

Command Prompt.
Iterate through Files in each directory in GAC
Files = System.IO.Directory.GetFiles(currentDirectory, “*.dll”);

This will give you the Assembly Name.
Iterate through the directories in this folder

For example, C:WindowsassemblyGACADODB has only one folder: 7.0.3300.0__b03f5f7f11d50a3a
Split this by ‘_’ to get two parts. Part-I represents the version of the assembly and Part-II represents PublicKeyToken

This is faster than using reflection and is easy to develop as well.

Happy development!

References: Retrieving GAC Assemblies and Information from our NCG partner Punit Ganshani at the Punit Ganshani blog.