Prevent Assembly.GetTypes() from loading dependencies

Question

I have assembly A referencing assembly B. They are located in the same directory.

Type[] types = null;
try
{
  Assembly a = Assembly.Load("A.dll");
  types = a.GetTypes(); // loads B implicitly.
}
catch(ReflectionTypeLoadException ex)
{
  types = ex.Types.Where(x=>x!=null);
}

How do I prevent B from being loaded? I want GetTypes() to run as if B wasn't available and to return only available types and null's for not available so I could execute ex.Types.where(x=>x!=null);

I want to use the trick from How to prevent ReflectionTypeLoadException when calling Assembly.GetTypes()

This way I can get only types that don't depend on B and work with them.

Update:

I loaded A in the reflection as well as in the normal context. I used the reflection context A for calling GetTypes(). After getting types from the reflection context assembly, I had another problem. When I called Type.GetCustomAttributes(), I received the following exception

It is illegal to reflect on the custom attributes of a Type loaded via ReflectionOnlyGetType (see Assembly.ReflectionOnly) -- use CustomAttributeData instead.

I solved it by getting the same type from the normal context assembly.

//... code omited for brevity
Type reflectionType = reflectionAssembly.GetTypes()[0];
//... code omited for brevity
Type goodType = normalAssembly.GetType(reflectionType.FullName);

This way I prevented loading of B and used types from A independent from B.

Answer 1

It's 2022, and .NET 6 is here, so the solution mentioned above is officially obsolete.

Here is a new solution: https://github.com/dotnet/corefxlab/blob/master/docs/specs/typeloader.md

Apparently, this is an archived experimental repository, so you have to embed the code into your project manually. Take note of the license.