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I have an year or so old application which uses Expression Encoder 3 to generate thumbnails. Few of the users are complaining that they are receiving the following exception:

Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.Expression.Encoder.Utilities.dll' or one of its dependencies. This application has failed to start because the application configuration is incorrect.

The application contains in itself the required EE3 assemblies in the setup, so as such installation of Expression Encoder is not required.

All these crashes started to occur after the application was upgraded to .net 4.

Any clues on what might be happening?

[EDIT] Was able to reproduce the issue on one of our local systems. We did a clean install of Windows XP. Installed .net 4 and then our app. It crashed with the same exception. We could fix the issue by installing .net 3.5!

I was quick to point fingers at .net 4 backward compatibility.

So the question remains: any clues on what might be happening?

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Trainee4Life
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2 Answers2

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According to this question this seems to be an issue with EE3 itself in that it requires EE to be installed (via the installer) to work properly.

Sadly this also seems to be the case for EE4, according to this thread, due to a codec licence issue.

Sorry :/

Have you looked at MediaFoundation? it might serve as an alternative, although ive never used it myself.

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aL3891
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  • We managed to do it by checking dependencies between various dll and getting a closure with about six EE3 dll's. It has been working for over a year now until now when our application was migrated to .net 4. It still works for all those who have .net 3.5 installed. – Trainee4Life May 18 '11 at 18:31
  • On a side note, I made an interesting observation. I couldn't reproduce the crash on any of our machines even after uninstalling all .net frameworks except .net 4. It was only reproduced on a machine with clean installation of Windows XP as mentioned in my question. – Trainee4Life May 18 '11 at 18:34
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    Are all those dlls managed? .net 3.5 also has a dependency on VC++ libraries, perhaps its actually those that EE has a depedency on. That might also explain why it still works when .net 3.5 is uninstalled. I'd try looking at the dlls with [Dependecy walker](http://dependencywalker.com/) and see if you find any perticular VC++ dll in there, they are usually called mscvr or something like that. – aL3891 May 18 '11 at 18:41
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    One of the dll's had dependency on msvcr90.dll and msvcm90.dll. Looks like EE3 has dependency on VC++ 2008 runtime? – Trainee4Life May 18 '11 at 19:50
  • cool :) yes, mscvr90 is the 2008 vc++ runtuime. Just as a reference for other people, the VC runtime can be found [here](http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?familyid=9B2DA534-3E03-4391-8A4D-074B9F2BC1BF&displaylang=en) – aL3891 May 19 '11 at 07:56
  • FYI: VC++ 2010 is required for EE4 ;-) – Cray Jan 12 '18 at 10:38
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I had similar problems, where it wasn't working on a Windows7 64-bit server.

Here's some things I've learnt:

  • You must modify your project's build settings so it has a target platform of "x86".

  • You must ensure that the "Desktop Experience" feature is enabled on the target machine. See this blog.

Andrew Shepherd
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