Retrieving a collection of all instances of a certain type in thecurrent AppDomain

[skbergam]

Does anyone know if there is a way to retrieve a collection of all
instances of a certain type in the current AppDomain? I want to have
a function on my utility class with the following signature:

public static IEnumerable<T> GetAllInstances()

Does anyone know if this is possible?

 

[Mattias Sjögren]

Does anyone know if there is a way to retrieve a collection of all
instances of a certain type in the current AppDomain?

There's no general way to do that. It can be done from a debugger, but
not from your code (unless you write the class type and keep track of
all instances yourself).


Mattias

 

[skbergam]

There's no general way to do that. It can be done from a debugger, but
not from your code (unless you write the classtypeand keep track ofallinstancesyourself).

Mattias

How does the debugger do it? Is there a debugger API?

 

[Mattias Sjögren]

How does the debugger do it? Is there a debugger API?

You can do a lot of fun things with the SOS debugger extensions
(http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb190764.aspx) and its
DumpHeap command. But I don't know exactly how it does it (I can
guess, but I don't think it would be of any help).


Mattias