How to read assembly attributes

Question

In my program, how can I read the properties set in AssemblyInfo.cs:

[assembly: AssemblyTitle("My Product")] [assembly: AssemblyDescription("...")] [assembly: AssemblyConfiguration("")] [assembly: AssemblyCompany("Radeldudel inc.")] [assembly: AssemblyProduct("My Product")] [assembly: AssemblyCopyright("Copyright @ me 2008")] [assembly: AssemblyTrademark("")] [assembly: AssemblyCulture("")] 

I'd like to display some of these values to the user of my program, so I'd like to know how to load them from the main program and from komponent assemblies I'm using.

Answer 1

This is reasonably easy. You have to use reflection. You need an instance of Assembly that represents the assembly with the attributes you want to read. An easy way of getting this is to do:

typeof(MyTypeInAssembly).Assembly 

Then you can do this, for example:

object[] attributes = assembly.GetCustomAttributes(typeof(AssemblyProductAttribute), false);  AssemblyProductAttribute attribute = null; if (attributes.Length > 0) {    attribute = attributes[0] as AssemblyProductAttribute; } 

Referencing attribute.Product will now give you the value you passed to the attribute in your AssemblyInfo.cs. Of course, if the attribute you look for can occur more than once, you may get multiple instances in the array returned by GetCustomAttributes, but this is not usually an issue for assembly level attributes like the ones you hope to retrieve.

Answer 2

I've created this extension method that uses Linq:

public static T GetAssemblyAttribute<T>(this System.Reflection.Assembly ass) where T :  Attribute {     object[] attributes = ass.GetCustomAttributes(typeof(T), false);     if (attributes == null || attributes.Length == 0)         return null;     return attributes.OfType<T>().SingleOrDefault(); } 

and then you can conveniently use it like that:

var attr = targetAssembly.GetAssemblyAttribute<AssemblyDescriptionAttribute>(); if(attr != null)      Console.WriteLine("{0} Assembly Description:{1}", Environment.NewLine, attr.Description);