The TestCentric.Metadata library is used for accessing assembly metadata
without loading the target assembly and without use of reflection. Most of
the code is taken from Mono.Cecil on which it is based. The metadata may
be examined but modification is not supported and there is no provision for
accessing the generated code.
This library was created as part of the TestCentric engine for loading and running tests, but is suitable for use by any application, which needs to examine assembly metadata. It has no dependencies other than the appropriate Microsoft SDKs for each build.
Currently, the library is built for .NET Framework 2.0 and 4.0 and .NET Standard 1.6 and 2.0. It is available as nuget package TestCentric.Metadata on nuget.org. The package adds a reference to the library to any project in which it is installed.
When the TestCentric GUI project was created in 2018, it used Mono.Cecil
to examine assemblies, just as NUnit did. Use of Mono.Cecil, however, came
to present a number of problems for both projects. One was that the library
was larger than we needed, containing a great deal of unused functionality.
Another was that there seemed to be a risk in using it to examine assemblies,
which themselves depended on Mono.Cecil.
Those two problems were relatively small. More important was the fact that
Mono.Cecil was moving forward, dropping support for older platforms. This
presented a problem for a test framework committed to continued support for
tests using those platforms. While alternative solutions were possible, we
eventually settled on building a subset of Mono.Cecil and modifying the
code as needed so that a single build could be used by all our agents,
including those which ran tests on legacy platforms.
Initially, this subset was incorporated in the TestCentric engine itself, which
was separated from the GUI as a project in 2020. In the same year, we made
TestCentric.Metadata a separate project and package and it began to be used
by NUnit as well as TestCentric.
TestCentric.Metadata follows semantic versioning. Versions through 1.6.2 were
distributed as part of the TestCentric GUI project. Beginning with version 1.7,
it became an independent package, making it easier for the library to be used
in multiple projects.
TestCentric.Metadata is Open Source software, released under the MIT / X11 license. See LICENSE in the root of the distribution for a copy of the license.