Is there a good pattern for naïve assembly initialization?

Question

Say we have several assemblies, and they all implement IAnimal, and we'd like go to one place to find out about the presence of the other IAnimal implementation.

features:

• we don't want pre-knowledge outside of an assembly

• there could be a register class / method within the assembly

• it is preferable not to use reflection. So far this seems to be the only way though

discussion:

I imagined doing this statically via inheritance, however, I'm not aware of an assembly level initialization sequence.

Answer 1

I suggest taking a look at MEF. It is practically designed for this kind of thing.

It does use reflection, as this is the mechanism created for such dynamic discovery. I doubt you will find a solution that doesn't use some level of reflection.