How do I determine the dependencies of a .NET application?

by

Dependency walker works on normal win32 binaries. All .NET dll’s and exe’s have a small stub header part which makes them look like normal binaries, but all it basically says is “load the CLR” – so that’s all that dependency walker will tell you.

To see which things your .NET app actually relies on, you can use the tremendously excellent .NET reflector from Red Gate. (EDIT: Note that .NET Reflector is now a paid product. ILSpy is free and open source and very similar.)

Load your DLL into it, right click, and chose ‘Analyze’ – you’ll then see a “Depends On” item which will show you all the other dll’s (and methods inside those dll’s) that it needs.

It can sometimes get trickier though, in that your app depends on X dll, and X dll is present, but for whatever reason can’t be loaded or located at runtime.

To troubleshoot those kinds of issues, Microsoft have an Assembly Binding Log Viewer which can show you what’s going on at runtime

More Related Contents:

  1. What does Error-code 0xc0000135 (or -1073741515 Exit-code) mean when starting a Windows app?
  2. Dependency Walker: missing dlls
  3. Referencing 2 different versions of log4net in the same solution
  4. In what order are locations searched to load referenced DLLs?
  5. HintPath vs ReferencePath in Visual Studio
  6. Dependency graph of Visual Studio projects
  7. How do I find the PublicKeyToken for a particular dll?
  8. How does Copy-local work? log4net.dll is not being copied to MyProject output directory
  9. Merging .net managed dlls
  10. Calling .NET DLL in Inno Setup [duplicate]
  11. Adding a bindingRedirect to a .Net Standard library
  12. How to identify if the DLL is Debug or Release build (in .NET) [duplicate]
  13. how do I work around log4net keeping changing publickeytoken
  14. How can I make my managed NuGet package support C++/CLI projects?
  15. using ILMerge with .NET 4 libraries
  16. Convert a PCL to a regular Class Library
  17. How can I detect the type of a dll? (COM, .NET, WIN32)
  18. How can I tell whether two .NET DLLs are the same?
  19. Can Ruby import a .NET dll?
  20. Best way to get InnerXml of an XElement?
  21. Is it possible to set private property via reflection?
  22. Regex.IsMatch vs string.Contains
  23. How to load a .NET assembly for reflection operations and subsequently unload it?
  24. INotifyPropertyChanged property name – hardcode vs reflection?
  25. How to open a WOW64 registry key from a 64-bit .NET application
  26. Does this code prevent SQL injection?
  27. Does the .NET CLR JIT compile every method, every time?
  28. How do I launch an application after install in a Visual Studio Setup Project
  29. Is there a WPF Cheat Sheet available? [closed]
  30. .NET Windows Service needs to use STAThread

Leave a Comment