How to: Determine an Assembly's Fully Qualified Name

To discover the fully qualified name of an assembly in the global assembly cache, use the Global Assembly Cache Tool (Gacutil.exe). See How to: View the Contents of the Global Assembly Cache.

For assemblies that are not in the global assembly cache, you can use code to output the information to the console or to a variable, or you can use the Ildasm.exe (MSIL Disassembler) to examine the assembly's metadata, which contains the fully qualified name.

For more information about setting assembly attributes such as version, culture, and assembly name, see Setting Assembly Attributes. For more information about giving an assembly a strong name, see Creating and Using Strong-Named Assemblies.

Example

The following code example shows how to display the fully qualified name of an assembly containing a specified class to the console.

Imports System
Imports System.Reflection

Class asmname
    Public Shared Sub Main()
        Dim t As Type = GetType(System.Data.DataSet)
        Dim s As String = t.Assembly.FullName.ToString()
        Console.WriteLine("The fully qualified assembly name " +
            "containing the specified class is {0}.", s)
    End Sub
End Class

using System;
using System.Reflection;

class asmname
{
    public static void Main()
    {
        Type t = typeof(System.Data.DataSet);
        string s = t.Assembly.FullName.ToString();
        Console.WriteLine("The fully qualified assembly name " +
            "containing the specified class is {0}.", s);
    }
}

#using <System.dll>
#using <System.Data.dll>

using namespace System;
using namespace System::Reflection;

ref class asmname
{
public:
    static void Main()
    {
        Type^ t = System::Data::DataSet::typeid;
        String^ s = t->Assembly->FullName->ToString();
        Console::WriteLine("The fully qualified assembly name " +
            "containing the specified class is {0}.", s);
    }
};

int main()
{
    asmname::Main();
}

See Also

Concepts

Assembly Names

Creating Assemblies

Global Assembly Cache

How the Runtime Locates Assemblies

Other Resources

Creating and Using Strong-Named Assemblies

Programming with Assemblies