Oqtane Concepts: DLL Handling

How / Why DLLs are loaded into memory:

• the .NET Core philosophy is to only load the specific assemblies an app needs ( to reduce startup time and memory )
• by default .NET Core will only load assemblies statically linked to the main app - it will not load every DLL in the /bin
• it will not load Oqtane module/theme DLLs as these are dynamically linked
• therefore Oqtane needs to manually load its modules/themes
• in order to do this it needs to be able to quickly identify the DLLs
• the only option available is via filename, as any other approach requires reflection which consumes startup time/processing and memory
• the convention is that the filename must contain oqtane
• once the required DLLs are loaded into the AppDomain, subsequent operations for assemblies can use the AppDomain rather than the file system
• the majority of assemblies in the AppDomain are not relevant to Oqtane
• reflection is expensive so we should only use reflection on assemblies which are actually relevant to Oqtane
• assembly fullname is same as DLL filename, so we can look for the oqtane qualifier to identify Oqtane assemblies