how to read the assembly manifest without loading the .dll

Question

Essentially need to read the dependencies programmatically without loading the assembly itself, as then you can\'t unload them

Answer 1

Use DnSpy (it won't load the dll in your program):

        var assemblyDef = dnlib.DotNet.AssemblyDef.Load("myDllName.dll");
        var manifest = assemblyDef.ManifestModule; // do whatever you want from here

ref: https://www.nuget.org/packages/dnSpyLibs

I did a blog post on that: https://medium.com/angular-and-dot-net/reading-assembly-info-without-loading-it-in-c-31a4bea7ef73