Variations and custom field

Question

I have a multilingual SharePoint site which uses variations. However on deployment the content isn't being deployed to the other variation sites. When the "Variations Propagate Sites and Lists Timer Job" timer job runs I get the following error in the logs:

The type 'Example.Fields.ExampleFieldType, Example, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=2a41e5afbfa097d1' could not be deserialized. Exception: System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Could not load file or assembly 'Example, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=2a41e5afbfa097d1' or one of its dependencies.

Field type Example is not installed properly. Go to the list settings page to delete this field.

I've checked multiple times and the full name of the field is definitely correct. The field works fine in the root site and the assembly is definitely in the GAC as it's being used in the deployment.

Has anyone had any experience with this? Has anyone got variations working with custom field types. Could something be wrong with my field. I can't see anything untoward about it. It's just a MultiColumn field.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

If anyone else ever has this issue. It turns out that restarting the timer job after uninstalling the old solution stops it happening. I'm not quite sure how it knew the assembly was different as though the code and assembly version were the same.

net stop SPTimerV4
net start SPTimerV4

Between

Uninstall-SPSolution
Install-SPSolution

And no more problems.