Is it possible to save a dynamic assembly to disk?

Question

I recently bought Ayende's book Building DSLs in Boo (buy it, read it, it's awesome) but I'm coming up against an implementation problem and I want to see what the generated code looks like. I would normally use reflector to look at the code but in this case the assemblies are dynamic and only in memory. Is there a way to save dynamic assemblies to disk so that I can reflect them?

EDIT / My Answer:

Wow, it took awhile to come back to this one. Unfortunately I left an important bit out from the original question.

Important Bit: I'm using Ayende's RhinoDSL library as he recommends in the book. I have access to the boo compiler in my subclass of DslEngine which looks like this:

public class JobEngine : DslEngine
{
    protected override void CustomizeCompiler(Boo.Lang.Compiler.BooCompiler compiler, Boo.Lang.Compiler.CompilerPipeline pipeline, string[] urls)
    {
        pipeline.Insert(1, new ImplicitBaseClassCompilerStep(typeof (JobBase), "Prepare", "JobLanguage", "log4net", "Quartz"));
    }
}

To change the least and get what I wanted I needed to add one line...

public class JobEngine : DslEngine
{
    protected override void CustomizeCompiler(Boo.Lang.Compiler.BooCompiler compiler, Boo.Lang.Compiler.CompilerPipeline pipeline, string[] urls)
    {
        compiler.Parameters.GenerateInMemory = false; // <--- This one.
        pipeline.Insert(1, new ImplicitBaseClassCompilerStep(typeof (JobBase), "Prepare", "JobLanguage", "log4net", "Quartz"));
    }
}

This caused the compiler to output the assembly to my ~\LocalSettings\Temp directory and then I could then reflect it. It's important to note that making that change caused the rest of the program to break (RhinoDSL could no longer find the assemblies in memory because I output them to disk), so this is only useful as a debugging tool.

Answer 1

Look up where BooCompiler is instantiated, change the pipeline from CompileToMemory to CompileToFile

Answer 2

Yes, the AssemblyBuilder class has a Save method for this purpose. You need to use the appropriate mode for this, which is most likely RunAndSave:

AssemblyBuilder builder =
    AppDomain.CurrentDomain.DefineDynamicAssembly(
        name, AssemblyBuilderAccess.RunAndSave);
// build assembly
builder.Save(path);