Collision Finder - CodeProject

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Introduction

The Collision Finder application is intended to help a development team to find colliding references to external DLLs.

Background

During the development of our system, we encountered a problem regarding referencing different versions of external DLLs. The problem gets worse when there is second stage reference from an external DLL to another one, which has a wrong version.

In order to solve this problem, I developed an application that helps the development team to find collisions during integration (rather than at run time).

Using the code

There are three projects:

Console application: Returns a value of 1 if there is any collision, and 0 otherwise. The colliding DLLs will be printed out to the console.
Windows application: This application helps the developer to analyze the external references by showing all the relations between the DLLs that are being used in a specific folder.
Class library: The code beneath….
- Find: This method uses an input parameter of string type that represents the path to the folder to analyze, and returns true/false according to the existence of a collision.
- CollisionOutPut: get property, returns a string with all the collisions that were found.
- Data: returns a dataset of the analyzed data.

How to execute from a console application:

FindCollisions c = new FindCollisions();
bool reply = c.Find(args[0]); /// rgss[0] = your  directory
Console.Write(c.CollisionsOutPut); 
if (reply == false)
   return 1;
else
   return 0;

How to find all the references of the current DLL:

ReferenceCollisionDataSet.DllTableRow dllRow = 
                             _ds.DllTable.NewDllTableRow(); 
// file  = the curent dll/exe path
Assembly asm = Assembly.LoadFile(file);
AssemblyName asmName = asm.GetName(); 
//  the name of the dll/exe
dllRow.Name = asmName.Name;
// the version of the dll
dllRow.Version = asmName.Version.ToString();
_ds.DllTable.Rows.Add(dllRow); 
//run on all the references of the curent Assembly 
foreach (AssemblyName refName in asm.GetReferencedAssemblies())
{ 
  try { 
       //check if this reference is not a system reference 
      if (IsNotSystemRef(refName))
      {
          ReferenceCollisionDataSet.ReferenceTableRow refRow = 
                    _ds.ReferenceTable.NewReferenceTableRow();
          refRow.Dll_Name = asmName.Name; 
          refRow.Reference_Name = refName.Name;
          refRow.Version = refName.Version.ToString();
          _ds.ReferenceTable.Rows.Add(refRow);
      } 
  catch { } 
}