Hi,

we are using some kind of plug-in architecture in one of our products (based on .NET). We have to consider our customers or even 3rd party devs writing plug-ins for the product. The plug-ins will be .NET assemblies that are loaded by our product at run-time. We have no control about the quality or capabilities of the external plug-ins (apart from checking whether they implement the correct interfaces).

So we need to implement some kind of safety check while loading the plug-ins to make sure that our product (and the hosting environment) can actually host the plug-in or deliver a meaningful error message ("The plug-in your are loading needs .NET version 42.42 - the hosting system is only on version 33.33.").

Ideally the plug-ins would do this check internally, but our experience regarding their competence is so-so and in any case our product will get the blame, so we want to make sure that this "just works". Requiring the plug-in developers to provide the info in the metadata or to explicitly provide the information in the interface is considered "too complicated".

I know about the Assembly.ImageRuntimeVersion property. But to my knowledge this tells me only the needed CLR version, not the framework version. And I don't want to check all of the assembly's dependencies and match them against a table of "framework version vs. available assemblies".

Do you have any ideas how to solve this in a simple and maintainable

fashion?

Thanks & regards, Bon