colinramsay.co.uk

When building Wiretap, I wanted an easy way of adding new Test Types without having to do much work. It occurred to me that what I needed was to basically supporting Test Types as plugins, so I wrote a small method to achieve this. Here's the code, adapted for general use.

public IPlugin LoadPluginFromAssembly(string pluginAssembly, string pluginType)
{
	// This should come froma config file
	string sourceAssemblyPath = @"c:\plugins\" + pluginAssembly + ".dll";</code>

	// Load the dll containing containing the plugin type
	Assembly assembly = Assembly.LoadFrom(sourceAssemblyPath);

	Type testType = null;

	try
	{
		// Search all of the types until we find
		// one which matches the specified plugin type
		foreach (Type type in assembly.GetTypes())
		{
			if (type.IsClass)
			{
				if (type.FullName.EndsWith("." + testInstance.TestType.Type))
				{
					testType = type;
				}
			}
		}
	}
	catch (Exception ex)
	{
		_logger.Error(ex.Message);
	}

	return Activator.CreateInstance(testType) as IPlugin;
}