Sometimes, you need to scan all the types in an assembly for a certain reason. For example, ASP.NET MVC does this to look for potential controllers. One naïve implementation is to simply call Assembly.GetTypes() and hope for the best. But there’s a problem with this. As Suzanne Cook points out, If a type can't be loaded for some reason during a call to Module.GetTypes(), ReflectionTypeLoadException will be thrown. Assembly.GetTypes() also throws this because it calls Module.GetTypes(). In other words, if any type can’t be loaded, the entire method call blows up and...
It was a dark and stormy coding session; the rain fell in torrents as my eyes were locked to two LCD screens in a furious display of coding … …sorry sorry, I just can’t continue. It’s all a lie. This actually a cautionary tale describing one subtle way that you can run afoul Code Access Security (CAS) when attempting to run an application in partial trust. But who wants to read about that? Right? Right? Well this isn’t a sordid tale, but if you bear with me, you may just find it interesting. Either...
UPDATE: 2011/02/13: This code is now included in the RouteMagic NuGet package! To use this code, simply run Install-Package RouteMagic within the NuGet Package Manager Console. In general, once you deploy your ASP.NET MVC application, you can’t change the routes for your application without recompiling the application and redeploying the assembly where your routes are defined. This is partly by design as routes are generally considered application code, and should have associated unit tests to verify that the routes are correct. A misconfigured route could seriously tank your application. Having said that, there are many situations in...