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Could you tell me the best approach for this scenario. I have inherited a new project and have not come across this scenario before.

We have a reference in our C# Windows Forms application to a 3rd party tool for producing documents.

There are two different versions of the 3rd party tool in the deployment environment installed on people's PCs - v1.0 and v2.0.

I can only build our Windows Forms application to work with either v1.0 or v2.0 of the 3rd party tool. To do so I have to install either version on my development PC before building. This is obviously a bad approach as I have to uninstall/reinstall the 3rd party tool each time. If I build with the wrong version on my PC the user receives 

Could not load file or assembly 'Interop.IManage, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral,     
PublicKeyToken=141424aa94e741g5' or one of its dependencies. The located assembly's 
manifest definition does not match the assembly reference.

There appears to be only one reference to a dll in the project, which is using a GAC reference.

C:\WINDOWS\assembly\GAC\Interop.iManage\1.0.0.0__141424aa94e741g\third.partyTool.dll

Which changes to this of I uninstall v1.0 and install v2.0

C:\WINDOWS\assembly\GAC\Interop.iManage\2.0.0.0__141424aa94e741g\third.partyTool.dll

In terms of deployment of our application, we do a simple XCOPY of the files, there is no installer.

Is there a way I can hold both references in our application and then have it use the correct reference once deployed? Or is there a deployment method I could use to get around this?

Thanks

Hoody
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  • It is entirely unclear why you must uninstall one of the versions. The point of the GAC is that you don't have to. So just don't. Keep reference assemblies in seperate folders, never reference the GAC directly in your project. One Red Flag: is this *really* a .NET 1.x assembly? – Hans Passant Oct 29 '12 at 11:56

1 Answers1

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You can build always against the 1.0.0 3rd party assembly and then do a binding redirect (in your app config) to use the 2.0.0 version, if available.

See here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/eftw1fys(v=vs.100).aspx for more details.

Some more samples here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/thottams/archive/2007/01/30/introduction-to-versioning-and-bindingredirect.aspx?Redirected=true.

A SO post also describes a common problem when setting up binding redirection: Assembly binding redirect does not work.

Community
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Marcel N.
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