How do I get the version of an assembly without loading it?

One small function of a large program examines assemblies in a folder and replaces out-of-date assemblies with the latest versions. To accomplish this, it needs to read the version numbers of the existing assembly files without actually loading those assemblies into the executing process.

I found the following in this article.

using System.Reflection;
using System.IO;

...

// Get current and updated assemblies
AssemblyName currentAssemblyName = AssemblyName.GetAssemblyName(currentAssemblyPath);
AssemblyName updatedAssemblyName = AssemblyName.GetAssemblyName(updatedAssemblyPath);

// Compare both versions
if (updatedAssemblyName.Version.CompareTo(currentAssemblyName.Version) <= 0)
{
    // There's nothing to update
    return;
}

// Update older version
File.Copy(updatedAssemblyPath, currentAssemblyPath, true);

Depending on the files, one option might be FileVersionInfo - i.e.

FileVersionInfo fvi = FileVersionInfo.GetVersionInfo(path)
string ver = fvi.FileVersion;

The problem is that this depends on the code having the [AssemblyFileVersion] attribute, and it matching the [AssemblyVersion] attribute.

I think I'd look at the AssemblyName options suggested by others first, though.