Examining the Modules in an Assembly using Reflection in .NET

A Module is a container for type information. If you’d like to inspect the Modules available in an assembly, you’ll first need to get a reference to the assembly in question. Once you have the reference to the assembly you can get hold of the modules as follows:

Assembly callingAssembly = Assembly.GetCallingAssembly();
Module[] modulesInCallingAssembly = callingAssembly.GetModules();

You can then iterate through the module array and read its properties:

foreach (Module module in modulesInCallingAssembly)
{
	Console.WriteLine(module.FullyQualifiedName);
	Console.WriteLine(module.Name);
}

In my case, as this is a very simple Console app I got the following output:

C:\Studies\Reflection\ReflectionCodeBits\ReflectionCodeBits\bin\Debug\ReflectionCodeBits.exe
ReflectionCodeBits.exe

Therefore the FullyQualifiedName property returns the full file path to the module. The Name property only returns the name without the file path.

The Module class has a couple of exciting methods to extract the fields and methods attached to it:

MethodInfo[] methods = module.GetMethods();
FieldInfo[] fields = module.GetFields();

We’ll take up FieldInfo and MethodInfo in later blog posts on Reflection to see what we can do with them.

View all posts on Reflection here.