Why does Xamarin.Android remap assembly requests?

Question

While running a Xamarin.Android app, the following message appears numerous times in the console:

[Mono] The request to load the assembly mscorlib v2.0.5.0 was remapped to v2.0.0.0

This has been raised in the Xamarin forum as well, but I can't find an explanation anywhere. What is happening, is it bad for performance, and is there a fix?

Answer 1

It is related to Portable Class Libraries,

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg597391(v=vs.110).aspx

The v2.0.5.0 version is only a metadata container that is used solely for development and compilation. At runtime, the CLR (either Microsoft .NET or Mono) maps such references to the real target reference with v2.0.0.0 in Xamarin.Android case, or v4.0.0.0 in .NET Framework 4 case.

The performance impact should be minimal, while you get all the benefits of cross platform support. But definitely we need some official explanation from Xamarin employees (you should contact Xamarin support for a quicker answer).