Resolving assembly version mismatches

Dec 6, 2016  

While migrating our Lydia solution from PCL to .NET Standard and upgrading the various projects, my tests started to fail with the following exception:

Could not load file or assembly ‘System.Reactive.Interfaces, Version=3.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=94bc3704cddfc263’ or one of its dependencies. The located assembly’s manifest definition does not match the assembly reference. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131040)

My test assembly Tests.Epsitec.Extensions targets .NET 4.6.2 and references System.Reactive. It also references project Epsitec.Extensions which builds an assembly adhering to .NET Standard 1.3, and which also references the NuGet package for System.Reactive.

After installing System.Reactive v3.1.1, Visual Studio 2015 adds following assemblies to both projects:

  • System.Reactive.Core, v3.1.1
  • System.Reactive.Interfaces, v3.1.1
  • …

Broken test

When the test is executed, .NET tries to load assembly Epsitec.Extensions, but this fails. Here is the detailed information (edited for clarity):

  • DisplayName: System.Reactive.Interfaces, Version=3.0.0.0, PublicKeyToken=94bc3704cddfc263
  • Appbase: file:///S:/git/rnd/lydia-dev/lydia/Tests.Epsitec.Extensions/bin/Debug
  • Calling assembly: Epsitec.Extensions, Version=1.0.0.0, PublicKeyToken=…
  • …
  • Using application configuration file: Tests.Epsitec.Extensions.dll.config
  • Post-policy reference: System.Reactive.Interfaces, Version=3.0.0.0 …
  • …
  • Comparing the assembly name resulted in the mismatch: Build Number
  • Failed to complete setup of assembly (hr = 0x80131040). Probing terminated.

So what’s going on here?

When the test project starts, it loads System.Reactive.Interfaces (version 3.0.1000.0) found in packages/System.Reactive.Interfaces.3.1.1/lib/net45.

When .NET tries to load Epsitec.Extensions, no matching System.Reactive.Interfaces can be located. Indeed, the assembly was compiled as .NET Standard 1.3 and thus refers to another version (3.0.0.0) found in packages/System.Reactive.Interfaces.3.1.1/lib/netstandard1.0.

This is a known issue and this is by design, as Oren Novotny explains.

Configure an assembly binding redirection

The solution is to add this <dependentAssembly> entry in the test project’s app.config file:

<dependentAssembly>
  <assemblyIdentity name="System.Reactive.Interfaces" publicKeyToken="94bc3704cddfc263" culture="neutral" />
  <bindingRedirect oldVersion="0.0.0.0-3.0.3000.0" newVersion="3.0.1000.0" />
</dependentAssembly>

This tells the loader to map all versions up to 3.0.3000.0 to the one which gets loaded with the test project (3.0.1000.0). With this in place, everything works fine again. See MSDN for a detailed explanation.

Root cause

Somehow, System.Reactive.Interfaces was not included in the redirects when I added the NuGet package System.Reactive. Yet, there was a redirect for the core assembly, System.Reactive.Core.

I don’t know the reason for this. But with the current version of Visual Studio 2015 Update 3, the error is systematic.