Loading .NET Assemblies in PowerShell

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PowerShell is built on .NET. You can interact with .NET in many ways with PowerShell. Many PowerShell modules are also .NET assemblies. This post will show how to load .NET Assemblies into PowerShell.

Add-Type

You can load assemblies using the Add-Type cmdlet. Specify the -AssemblyName parameter to load assemblies from either the global assembly cache or from a path.

Add-Type -AssemblyName 'System.Windows.Forms'
Add-Type -AssemblyName 'C:\src\universal\src\output\Universal.Cmdlets.dll'

Assembly.LoadFrom

You can also load assemblies using the System.Reflection.Assembly.LoadFrom method. This method accepts a path and will return the assembly object after loading it.

[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadFrom('C:\src\universal\src\output\Universal.Cmdlets.dll')

Assembly.LoadWithPartialName

The Assembly.LoadWithPartialName method will load an assembly from the global assembly cache based on a partial name of the assembly. This is similar to how Add-Type -AssemblyName works.

[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName('System.Windows.Forms')

Import-Module

Import-Module will also load assemblies. It will also expose any cmdlets provided by the assembly if they exist. You cannot load exe assemblies with Import-Module.

Import-Module 'C:\src\universal\src\output\Universal.Cmdlets.dll'

using Statement

You can also load assemblies with the using statement. This loads the assemblies at parse time rather than execution time and is used when defining PowerShell classes.

using assembly C:\src\universal\src\output\Universal.Cmdlets.dll