Scott Hanselman

When it rains it pours.  Twice today folks came looking when unexpected behaviors occured after an SDK upgrade.

If you're using a versioning scheme, always ask yourself, what version of my assembly has been loaded into this AppDomain?  It's even more important to be aware (and not to Program By Coincidence) when using the GAC.

Digging into the problem showed that the wrong version was being loaded - an older version from the GAC due to an incorrect bindingRedirect.

A few tools to be aware of and WHAT they tell you about Assembly Binding:

• Binding before it happens: ILDASM or Reflector will tell you what your assembly wants (what it was compiled against)
• Binding as it happens: Fusion (the Assembly Binding Log Viewer) will show you all assembly binds if you set the HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Fusion\ForceLog registry value to 1
• Binding after it happens: Process Explorer will tell you what DLL (assembly) is loaded in memory and from where it came.

In this case, a little command line showed me:

C:\>gacutil /l | find /i "Corillian" | more
   <snip>
Corillian.Thingie.Whatzit, Version=3.1.0.39, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=xx
Corillian.Thingie.Whatzit, Version=3.1.1.31, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=xx

Ah! There's an older version in the GAC, probably supporting another Web on this box.  Our ASP.NET site was compiled against this (says Reflector) and we confirm the wrong one was loaded with Process Explorer. But, we need a bug fix from the new version and can't recompile, so, in our Web.config we added:

<runtime>
  <assemblyBinding xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1">
   <dependentAssembly>
    <assemblyIdentity name="Corillian.Thingie.Whatzit"
     publicKeyToken="xx"
     culture="neutral" />
    <bindingRedirect oldVersion="3.1.0.39" newVersion="3.1.1.31" />
   </dependentAssembly>
  </assemblyBinding>
</runtime>

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Great stuff on using NUnit in conjunction with external files from Patrick Cauldwell.  It's one of those "Doh!" things that I've always MEANT to do, but somehow ended up using Pre- and Post-Build events instead.  I MUCH prefer Patrick's method.  It's much cleaner and it allows the once-external file to LIVE with the test.

        [SetUp] public void SetUp()
        {
            Assembly a = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly();
            using (Stream s = a.GetManifestResourceStream("MyNameSpace.something.txt"))
            {
                using (StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(s))
                {
                    using (StreamWriter sw = File.CreateText(webConfigPath))
                    {
                        sw.Write(sr.ReadToEnd());
                        sw.Flush();
                    }
                }
            }
        }

        [TearDown] public void TearDown()
        {
            if(File.Exists(webConfigPath))
            {
                File.Delete(webConfigPath);
            }
        }

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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If you're not careful, and you have both versions of the .NET Framework on your box (1.0 and 1.1) NAnt will build your stuff using .NET 1.0.  Whether that's what you want or not, it's important to be explicit.

There's two ways:

• Add <property name="nant.settings.currentframework" value="net-1.1"/> to your .build file(s).

or, to make the change to .NET 1.1 as the default, look in the NAnt.exe.config file in the same directory as NAnt.exe.

In this XML config file, in /configuration/nant/framework/platform[@default] you'll want to set that default attribute to "net-1.1" like this.  Note: The ID "net-1.1" corresponds to a named <framework> section called "net-1.1" further down in the file that gives NAnt all the info it needs to build on that version.  NAnt can also be used to build Mono, at least as of version 0.28 of Mono.

<configuration>
     ...snip...
  <nant>
        <frameworks>
            <platform name="win32" default="net-1.1">

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Often when building MSI Windows Installers from ASP.NET Web Projects within Visual Studio.NET you'll get this error:

Unable to build project output group 'Content Files from SOMEWEB (Active)'

And you'll have no idea why this happened, no descriptive error message, nada.

Turns out that this is the MSI builder's way of telling you that it can't physically find a Content File that is referenced in the Project (CSPROJ, or VBPROJ). 

The trick is turn on 'Show All Files' and open every folder until you find one with the Yellow Yield Icon.  This subtle tip is telling you that this file doesn't exist on disk, but it does exist in the Project.  Right-Click on it and Exclude From Project. 

When the MSI Installer builder can't find a file marked as Content, it borks.

Enjoy.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Interesting stuff from Adi Oltean, a DCOM Server implemented entirely in C# - great stuff, I've been there, brother.  I've said before, DCOM deserves our respect.  Calling back to something Clemens said:

Enterprise Services has a very elegant solution for mixing the two models in that it uses Remoting to do almost all marshaling work (with two exceptions: QC and calls with isomorphic call sigs) and then tunnels the serialized IMessage through DCOM transport, which means that you get full CLR type fidelity while using a rock solid transport that has been continuously optimized ever since 1993. I understand that some people consider a 10 year old protocol boring; I just call it "stable." [Clemens Vasters]

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

About   Newsletter

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