AppDomain.CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies fails with ReflectionTypeLoadException

Question

During unittesting I have run into a problem with the following code that asks for all the loaded assemblies:

var res = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies()
.SelectMany(x => x.GetTypes())
.ToList();

this code fails with a ReflectionTypeLoadException which has inner exceptions of the pattern

Could not load type Microsoft.Xml.Serialization.GeneratedAssembly.FOO

where FOO are some specific classes also coded by us.

The problem arises when running unittests prior to the above which creates XML documents using the XDocument class.

I may not necesarilly want to load these code generated classes (I'm guessing Microsoft.Xml.Serialization.GeneratedAssembly.* is code generated.) I just want to understand whats wrong.

Answer 1

You should check IsDynamic field of your assembly which is availabe at .netframework 4 and later.

var res = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies().Where(ass => ass.IsDynamic == false)
.SelectMany(x => x.GetTypes())
.ToList();

Answer 2

I ended up concluding that the classes that are run-time code generated for serialization and xmlserialization (and others?) are uninterestingto me. Thus the following filter helped

return AppDomain.CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies()
.Where(x => !x.FullName.StartsWith("Microsoft.GeneratedCode"))
.SelectMany(x => x.GetTypes())
.ToList();

Answer 3

Can you turn on Fusion log to see why are the Assemblies failing to load?

How to enable assembly bind failure logging (Fusion) in .NET