Assembly Names

By Eric — — 1 minute read

I always have a hard time keeping straight all the possible ways of getting an assembly's name and what form the various methods return. Here's a little program and its output for a reference.

class Program 
{ 
    static void Main(string[] args) 
    { 
        Assembly assembly = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly(); 
        Console.WriteLine("Assembly.ToString()           : {0}", assembly.ToString()); 
        Console.WriteLine("Assembly.FullName             : {0}", assembly.FullName); 
        Console.WriteLine("Assembly.GetName().ToString() : {0}", assembly.GetName().ToString()); 
        AssemblyName assemblyName = assembly.GetName(); 
        Console.WriteLine("AssemblyName.FullName         : {0}", assemblyName.FullName); 
        Console.WriteLine("AssemblyName.Name             : {0}", assemblyName.Name); 
    } 
}

Output:

Assembly.ToString()           : MyAssembly, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null 
Assembly.FullName             : MyAssembly, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null 
Assembly.GetName().ToString() : MyAssembly, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null 
AssemblyName.FullName         : MyAssembly, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null 
AssemblyName.Name             : MyAssembly

Basically, most of the methods return the complete assembly name (and the PublicKeyToken would be non-null if the assembly were strongly named). To get the short name of the assembly, you need to get the AssemblyName object's Name property.