The located assembly's manifest definition doe

Question

I am trying to run some unit tests in a C# Windows Forms application (Visual Studio 2005), and I get the following error:

System.IO.FileLoadException: Could not load file or assembly 'Utility, Version=1.2.0.200, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=764d581291d764f7' or one of its dependencies. The located assembly's manifest definition does not match the assembly reference. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131040)**

at x.Foo.FooGO()

at x.Foo.Foo2(String groupName_) in Foo.cs:line 123

at x.Foo.UnitTests.FooTests.TestFoo() in FooTests.cs:line 98**

System.IO.FileLoadException: Could not load file or assembly 'Utility, Version=1.2.0.203, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=764d581291d764f7' or one of its dependencies. The located assembly's manifest definition does not match the assembly reference. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131040)

I look in my references, and I only have a reference to Utility version 1.2.0.203 (the other one is old).

Any suggestions on how I figure out what is trying to reference this old version of this DLL file?

Besides, I don't think I even have this old assembly on my hard drive. Is there any tool to search for this old versioned assembly?

Answer 1

The following redirects any assembly version to version 3.1.0.0. We have a script that will always update this reference in the App.config so we never have to deal with this issue again.

Through reflection you can get the assembly publicKeyToken and generate this block from the .dll file itself.

<assemblyBinding xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1">
 <dependentAssembly>
    <assemblyIdentity name="Castle.Core" publicKeyToken="407dd0808d44fbdc" culture="neutral" />
    <bindingRedirect oldVersion="0.0.0.0-65535.65535.65535.65535" newVersion="3.1.0.0" />
  </dependentAssembly>
</assemblyBinding>

Note that without an XML namespace attribute (xmlns) this will not work.

Answer 2

I'll let someone benefit from my shear stupidity. I have some dependencies to a completely separate application (let's call this App1). The dll's from that App1 are pulled into my new application (App2). Any time I do updates in APP1, I have to create new dll's and copy them into App2. Well. . .I got tired of copying and pasting between 2 different App1 versions, so I simply added a 'NEW_' prefix to the dll's.

Well. . . I'm guessing that the build process scans the /bin folder and when it matches something up incorrectly, it barfs with the same error message as noted above. I deleted my "new_" versions and it built just dandy.

Answer 3

To me the code coverage configuration in the "Local.testtesttings" file "caused" the problem. I forgot to update the files that were referenced there.

Answer 4

clean and rebuild the solution might not replace all the dll's from the output directory.

what i'll suggest is try renaming the folder from "bin" to "oldbin" or "obj" to "oldobj"

and then try build your silution again.

incase if you are using any third party dll's those you will need to copy into newly created "bin" or "obj" folder after successful build.

hope this will work for you.

Answer 5

In my case the problem was between the chair and the keyboard :-)

Could not load file or assembly 'DotNetOpenAuth.Core, Version=4.0.0.0,
Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=2780ccd10d57b246' or one of its dependencies.
The located assembly's manifest definition does not match the assembly reference.
(Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131040)

Two or more different assemblies wanted to use a different version of the DotNetOpenAuth library, and that would not be a problem. Furthermore, on my local computer a web.config was automatically updated by NuGet:

<dependentAssembly>
    <assemblyIdentity name="DotNetOpenAuth.AspNet" publicKeyToken="2780ccd10d57b246" culture="neutral" />
        <bindingRedirect oldVersion="0.0.0.0-4.3.0.0" newVersion="4.3.0.0" />
    </dependentAssembly>
    <dependentAssembly>
        <assemblyIdentity name="DotNetOpenAuth.Core" publicKeyToken="2780ccd10d57b246" culture="neutral" />
    <bindingRedirect oldVersion="0.0.0.0-4.3.0.0" newVersion="4.3.0.0" />
</dependentAssembly>

Then I realized that I had forgot to copy/deploy the new web.config to the production server. So if you have manual way of deploying web.config, check it is updated. If you have completely different web.config for production server, you have to merge these dependentAssembly section in sync after using NuGet.

Answer 6

In my case it was an old version of the DLL in C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\~\Temporary ASP.NET Files\ directory. You can either delete or replace the old version, or you can remove and add back the reference to the DLL in your project. Basically, either way will create a new pointer to the temporary ASP.NET Files.