TestCentric.Metadata 3.0.2

TestCentric Metadata

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.

History

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.

Versioning

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.

Licensing

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.