C# plugins share AppDomain?

moon6969

TLDR: I have 2 independent C# plugins that appear to share the same .Net AppDomain when running in NPP.
Does anyone know the side-effects of this?
Is it something I should investigate further?

I wrote a C# plugin and had to jump through some hoops so .Net could find a required 2nd dll…

I hooked into AppDomain.CurrentDomain.AssemblyResolve event so I could give the exact path via System.Reflection.Assembly.LoadFrom().

This works well enough, but I just discovered that a new C# plugin I am writing is being trapped by the above event in the first plugin.

I can re-work the first plugin and avoid the AppDomain.CurrentDomain.AssemblyResolve event, but I am wondering if there is something I could do to prevent my plugin affecting other .Net plugins (and vice-versa).

Any thoughts?

Ekopalypse

@moon6969

what about this, sounds like you can isolate the domains. Note, I have no idea what I’m talking about.

Makwana Prahlad

Hello,@moon6969

Follow this information,To C# plugins share AppDomain?

1.Check if the assembly is already loaded
2.If its not loaded, read the assembly into a byte array. This will prevent locking the file.
3.Supply the byte array as an arguement to Assembly.Load

Assembly assembly = null;

foreach(Assembly loadedAssembly in AppDomain.CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies())
    if (loadedAssembly.FullName == "foobar, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null")
        assembly = loadedAssembly;

if(assembly == null)
{
    byte[] studybin = System.IO.File.ReadAllBytes(@"C:\pathToAssembly\foobar.dll");
    assembly = Assembly.Load(studybin);                
}

Note :
If you are trying to find a specific assembly in a directory, you can run ‘System.Reflection.AssemblyName.GetAssemblyName(path);’ to see if the FullName matches what you are looking for. ‘GetAssemblyName(path)’ does NOT inject the assembly into your current AppDomain.

I hope this information will be usefull.
Thank you.

moon6969

Thanks both.

I’ve not much idea myself about AppDomains, but I am swatting up. I’m also learning about Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) and Managed AddIn Framework (MAF) to see if they can help.

@Makwana-Prahlad
Thanks for the example - easier for me than theory sometimes!