One of the tools I use a lot when doing C++ development and debugging is “dependency walker”; an app that displays all the static dependencies of an executable. These are dependencies created by referencing functions from an import library (.lib file) at compile time. If any of the imported DLLs are missing at run-time, the executable will fail to load, normally with error 2: file not found. Obviously pretty disastrous in production. The .NET equivalent is the binding failure. You can track down what went wrong at runtime using fuslogvw, but I’ve often wished for a tool like ‘depends’ to work out up-front what dependencies are required. Luckily because assemblies includes a list of dependent libraries in the form of a manifest this information can be accessed using reflection.

I’m a big fan of the Mono.Cecil library for doing reflection (and more!) with .NET. I’ve had issues in the past where the built-in .NET reflection (using Assembly.ReflectionOnlyLoad) attempts to load dependent libraries as you iterate over exposed types, even though it’s not supposed to (unfortunately I don’t have a repro to hand). This makes it very difficult to work on an assembly without having all of its dependencies available. Cecil doesn’t have this problem because it accesses the assembly in a lower-level way.
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