I looking for an API to extract a resource from an assembly but don’t want to load the assembly itself, not even in a separate AppDomain.
Is there a way of reading Assembly ManifestResourceStreams that isn’t Assembly.GetManifestResourceStream, which requires loading the Assembly?
Example of what I’m looking for:
var r = new AssemblyResourceReader(“Test.dll”);
Stream s = r.GetResourceStream(“image.png”);
Found an answer: the System.Reflection.Metadata package has such utilities
using System.IO;
using System.Reflection.Metadata;
using System.Reflection.PortableExecutable;
public static class AssemblyMetadataReader
{
public static byte[] GetManifestResource(string asmPath, string resourceName)
{
using (var fs = File.OpenRead(asmPath))
{
PEReader per = new PEReader(fs);
MetadataReader mr = per.GetMetadataReader();
foreach (var resHandle in mr.ManifestResources)
{
var res = mr.GetManifestResource(resHandle);
if (!mr.StringComparer.Equals(res.Name, resourceName))
continue;
PEMemoryBlock resourceDirectory = per.GetSectionData(per.PEHeaders.CorHeader.ResourcesDirectory.RelativeVirtualAddress);
var reader = resourceDirectory.GetReader((int)res.Offset, resourceDirectory.Length - (int)res.Offset);
uint size = reader.ReadUInt32();
return reader.ReadBytes((int)size);
}
}
return null;
}
}
Found this from another answer :
You can use some API, for example CCI that allows you to look inside managed dll(s) without loading it using reflection mechanism.
Ref : how to read the assembly manifest without loading the .dll